Litmus Test
by Eatsscissors
Summary: Sam has the vision in 'Hunted' instead of Ava. Dean will do anything that he has to in order to protect Sam, even kill. DeanScott.
1. Chapter 1

Part One

It started like this.

Sam had a vision that lasted for so long that Dean was about to say fuck it and call an ambulance, their general aversion to authority be damned. It left Sam weak and irritable for hours afterwards. "Lafayette," Sam said in a low, tired voice that sounded as if he had been eating charcoal. It was close enough to a growl to make all of the hair on the back of Dean's neck stand on end. Sam wasn't acting like a killer-wasn't even acting as if he was thinking about being a killer-but that didn't necessarily mean anything. _Dad had said._

Yeah. Dad had said a lot of things. He had been wrong about some of them and right about a lot more, and that was the thing that kept Dean awake at night.

"Guesendheit," he said instead, reaching out to take Sam's pulse yet again, even if the only way that he knows how to tell good from bad is in beating versus not beating. Sam made an irritable face and slapped Dean's hand away. He sat up and rubbed his hand over his eyes as if they were hurting him. Sam looked at Dean as soon as he was done, really stared hard, that look that he got sometimes saying that he was nobody's fool and that he knew damned well that Dean has a lot more that he was not telling. That the only thing that was keeping Sam from pushing just as long and hard as he was capable of was the fact that he did not yet know where all of the landmines were. Not forever, though. Sammy was the single smartest person that Dean had ever known, and ever since he was very small it had been in Sam's nature to push until he made whatever problem that was standing before him give ground through sheer fatigue.

"I didn't sneeze," Sam said as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. He looked as if he was gathering himself for a few moments before he tried to stand. "Lafayette, Indiana. We have to go there."

"Why?" Dean asked automatically, even though he was pretty sure that he already knew the answer. All throughout the eerie fugue state that Sam had fallen into after he had stopped clutching at his head, his lips had been moving, he had been muttering in a voice so low that Dean had been forced to lean close in order to hear what Sam had to say. He had been talking about voices that told him to do things. That meant that Sam was either having a vision and someone in Indiana was getting the reverse Joan of Arc treatment, or…

'Fuck that noise,' Dean told himself savagely, like a child hoping that he could scare away the monsters in the dark by putting on a mask that made him look even bigger and scarier than they were. 'Dad can be wrong. It's happened before.' Yeah, but not nearly enough for Dean's liking in the situation that they found themselves in now.

"I saw a kid getting killed," Sam said. He stood finally, winced a little when his head did not like the movement. Sam let out a slow, pleased smile when his legs decided that they would take him, after all. Apparently there had been some confusion in the chain of command. "Kid like me. Powers."

"Oh." Dean was still sitting on the bed and watching as Sam paced back and forth across the confines of their small room in the process of throwing off the last of his vision hangover. The idea of letting Sam near any of those kids, knowing what he knew and what Sam still did not, was enough to make his stomach turn to glass. The good to evil ratio was not nearly what Dean would have liked it to be over on that side of the fence. "So you want to go, check it out?"

Sam broke off his pacing long enough to give Dean a look that could not have been any more incredulous if Dean had just announced that he liked banana earworms and that purple monkeys made the best dishwashers. "The kid _died_, Dean," he said before he started to get that look again, that 'oh shit, Sam's going to want to talk look', and suddenly Dean had an urge to hop to his feet and pace about himself.

"_Okay_," Dean said instead, and began throwing their clothes into the bags that they would then sling into the backseat of the Impala. He didn't raise his eyes to meet Sam's, as Sam was doing enough staring for the both of them. It was a hard prickle on the back of Dean's neck. "Just not sure that it's a job for us. You see this kid getting snacked on by your vampire babe, or signing anything in blood?"

"He _died_," Sam repeated, as if that ought to be enough. Probably it should have been; Dean wasn't sure that he was in a position to tell any longer. "He was killed by a knife, but that shouldn't matter. He has powers like mine, so the demon is going to be after him just like he's after me. That _makes_ it our kind of job."

"Sure it does," Dean said, and curved his mouth into a reassuring, big-brother kind of smile. Sam wasn't six any longer, though, and he still looked troubled as he began to help Dean with their clothes. "I'm just looking out for you, Sammy."

"Thanks," Sam said without looking convinced. Dean started to wonder what would happen if, while Sam was sleeping in the passenger seat one night, he turned towards the Grand Canyon without saying anything, how far he could get before Sam woke up, and how big of a fit Sam would throw when he did.

---

Sam knew that they needed to head for Lafayette based upon a split-second glimpse of a newspaper stand on the sidewalk next to the kid's car. That was not much to go on, especially when it came to a job that had such a high probability of putting Sam in both mortal and immortal danger, but Dean couldn't do much more protesting. Sam kept giving him the fish eye whenever he thought that Dean was not looking as it was. The way that things were going, he was going to think that it was downright suspicious when Dean started to leave brochures of glossy foreign locales around their hotel rooms next week.

They left the Impala parked several blocks away based upon a feeling that Dean could not quite articulate, other than it involved knowing that Sam was different now in the way that Dean was different, in the way that makes the both of them not quite human, and maybe Dad was right in keeping them away from other hunters for most of their lives. If this kid was different in the way that Sam was different, then maybe the reason that he was going to be killed was because he was suffering from a lack of someone to act as a buffer between himself and overzealous hunters. If that was the case, then it was to their best interest not to advertise their presence.

Even Dean was willing to admit that it was something of a reach. He brought along a shotgun loaded with rock salt all the same, just in case, and a hunting knife long enough and wicked enough to fuck up anything unlucky enough to be corporeal and in his way.

It was winter, and it was cold, darkness falling across the buildings in long, finger-like shadows even though Dean could have sworn that it was barely noon the last time that he had blinked. He and Sam used the shadows as allies and watched as the light crowds of the business class began to stream home. It was not long before the street was empty, and yet there had been no sing of a man in his early twenties matching the description that Sam had given.

"Maybe he changed his mind," Dean said brightly as the two of them lingered in the shadows and waited. "Maybe he met a lady. Maybe he decided to grab a burger."

Sam cut Dean a look suggesting that he was only a few minutes away from reaching over and smacking him. He focused on the street instead, saying only, "He didn't. He'll be here." The next glance that Sam slid Dean's way was not annoyed. Dean would rather that it was, instead of more of that silent concern.

The silence stretched while the night grew colder, and the very last of the business people had soon disappeared homeward. Sam seemed content to wait for as long as it took for the kid to show up. It was Dean who was finding himself overcome with an uncharacteristic twitchiness, Dean who found himself shifting his weight from one foot to the other while he wondered if this vision was real or a demon-sent trap. The possibility that Dad had just been _wrong_, however remote, was for the first time in his life a prospect worth looking forward to.

When the sound of a solitary pair of footsteps could finally be heard walking down the sidewalk, Sam turned and gave Dean a wide, self-satisfied grin. "This is what I saw," he said as he thrust out to indicate the shadowy, deserted street, wisps of peculiar fog just starting to roll in. He sounded happy, for a vision that had told him this kid was going to die without intervention. Did he sound too happy? Dean could not tell, and he was getting worn down by this constant need to analyze and then analyze again every small thing that Sam said or did.

The object of this whole trip came into view at long last, walking with his head dipped low and his hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his jacket. He passed so close to Sam and Dean without noticing them that Dean could have reached out and touched him if he wished. It gave Dean a great deal of time to look him over. Pale skin that looked as if he was far more a product of ill health more than natural inclination, dark hair that fell forward across his forehead, the kind of coffee-dark eyes that always seemed to flash when the owner was either angry or amused, all being offset by a set of high and nearly graceful cheekbones. The kid would have been good-looking, if he was sleeping or eating right. It was obvious at the moment that he was doing neither.

Dean did not realize that he had turned his head to watch the kid go until Sam elbowed him sharply in the ribs. "You can get a room after we save him. _Jesus_," Sam snapped as he left their darkened hiding place and began trailing the kid, who neither turned his head or seemed to realize that anyone else was after him at all. Definitely not a hunter, then.

Dean stared after his brother for several seconds and was sure that his expression was mildly horrified. There were a great many things that Dean was entirely comfortable with Sam knowing about him. Every single object of Dean's sexual interest was, he was fairly certain, not one of them. Life became very boring very quickly if a man couldn't maintain a little mystery; now he knew why Sam had such a fit every time that Dean ribbed him for sweet-talking a pretty set of legs. He could not help but make a faint snorting sound as he doubled his stride and caught up with Sam after only a few steps.

"Now, now, Sammy," he said. "Think that I'm going to have to take a look at that hard drive of yours. You've been branching out past 'Slippery Spring Break Adventures.'" Dean grinned broadly as Sam turned far enough to give him an annoyed look and then chopped his hand hard for silence. The kid whose rescue would hopefully end the night was too far ahead of them to hear anything that they said even if had been a hunter and trained to notice such things, but this job had been Sam's baby from the beginning. Dean guessed that he could follow Sam's lead.

They waited until the kid drew close to his car roughly one hundred yards ahead before they split away from each other by mutual, unspoken decision and drifted into the darkness on opposite sides of the street from one another. Dean kept his finger alert on the trigger of the gun as he drew ever closer to the oblivious target. The street appeared empty in both directions, but that did not mean anything. Dean could not see Sam on the other side of the street, either, and yet he knew that he was there. Sam had seen the kid being stabbed in his vision, too, which meant one of two things: either a ghost that had somehow managed to avoid being tied to a single place, or a human. If the kid was special, then that ruled out some kind of ritual-crazed lunatic unless this poor bastard was one of the most unlucky people to ever walk the planet. So they had a hunter.

Suddenly, letting Sammy take off on this little jaunt seemed like a worse idea by the second. Dean hunched further back against the brick wall and scowled.

He saw the silhouette creeping down the street long before the kid did, even though the shadow he was casting was long beneath the street lights and he was not taking any pains to hide his approach. At less than two steps, Dean knew that he was looking at a hunter. It was written in the way that he moved. At two more paces, Dean even knew who he was.

"Son of a bitch," he spit, barely remembering that he needed to keep his voice low. Dean raised his head and looked off in Sam's general direction. He was sure that his expression of shock and disgust was mirrored on Sam's own face. The decision not to look the other way while Lenore chowed down on their good buddy Gordy was looking like a worse one by the moment.

Yeah, ethically wrong, all that jazz. Dean was in less of a mood to think about ethics and all of its should-haves and could-haves by the day. He took a deep breath and grit his teeth hard as he realized that channeling his anger for the job was not going to be an issue.

Gordon glided up behind the kid just as easily as moving silk, all loose-limbed predator's confidence, and the kid did not expect a thing until Gordon was practically on top of him. _Finally_ the kid twigged to the fact that there was a reflection other than this own in the window of his car and spun around, those pale features losing their veil of distraction. He backed up against the car even though there was nowhere else to go.

Dean was not interested in seeing what would happen next. Without waiting to see what Sam was doing, he stepped free from the shadows and issues a sharp whistling sound from between his teeth. Gordon paused for only a second before he turned his head in the direction of Dean's approach, slowly and as if he had been expecting to see Dean there all along.

"Dean," he said, and tapped his knife against the trapped kid's chest in a gesture that looked nearly contemplative. The kid mostly only looked as if he was on the verge of passing out. "Guess this means that that brother of yours is around here somewhere." He scanned the darkness with knowing eyes.

Something inside of Dean turned brittle and cold. "Might be," he said, unshouldering the shotgun and watching as Gordon continued to tap and trace patterns against the kid's chest. He would have him gutted from his throat down to his navel before Dean could even think about taking the knife away. Bad plan, then. The kid was staring at Dean all full of bug-eyed, mute appeal, even though Dean had to give credit where credit was due and note that he was keeping it together not to beg or cry as a lot of people would have done in his situation. Dean could still barely look at him.

Gordon flashed a smile that was all teeth and no mirth before he tapped the knife against the kid's chest again, a little too hard this time. A red spot appeared on the kid's chest, and he gasped in pain. "Don't play stupid, Dean, we both know that it's not the real you," Gordon said. "Scotty here's wrong-tainted-in the same way that Sammy is, and they both have to be dealt with in the same way."

"I'm not _wrong_," the kid, Scotty, whatever, spoke for the first time, though he lacked a certain conviction. On anyone else and in any other circumstances Dean would have attributed that to nothing other than human fear, even if the kid was keeping himself together a lot better than most people would have done. Good buddy Scotty was most people about as much as Sammy was.

"Shut up, you filthy monster," Gordon whirled around and snarled at the kid, going from steady and nearly rational to feral in less time that it took for Dean to blink twice. The knife flashed; the kid yelped.

Scotty was probably not in the mood to appreciate this, but he was getting damned lucky that night. It did not take Dean two blinks worth of time to raise the shotgun up to his shoulder and fire. There was a great booming sound that echoed and reechoed around the buildings and nearly obliterated the sound of Gordon yelping and the kid yelping again. Rock salt hurt like a bitch. Dean would know.

Gordon staggered back from Scotty but did not let go of his knife, while the kid dropped like a stone. All that Dean could see in the dim light was a dark smear of blood. He did not have the time to pause and see how badly the kid was hurt or even if Dean's and Sam's mission was going to be futile, after all. Dean ejected the spent shells, dropped the gun, and went for his knife as Gordon continued to back away with his hand covering one side of his face. There was blood leaking around his fingers. Dean could not stop his mouth from curving upwards into a small and malicious smile.

"You son of a bitch," Gordon growled as he lunged at Dean. He nearly tripped over the fallen kid's splayed legs as he did so, as Scotty seemed to have fallen to the very bottom of his radar. That meant that Sam had fallen off of it altogether, which was a state of affairs that Dean liked just fine.

"Hey!" Sam barked from behind Gordon as Dean blocked a killing blow from Gordon's knife with his own. Gordon turned towards and received a solid punch to the mouth for his trouble. It knocked him back against Dean, who had to turn his knife quickly to the side so that he would not wind up stabbing Gordon with it and very likely killing him. That was not a line that Dean was willing to cross quite yet, though it scared him to think that when it came to protecting Sam it might be easier to lead him across that line than he would have thought possible. That fear came very close to being confirmed when Gordon reared back and threw his knife with a hunter's speed and precision at Sam's chest. Dean's first thought upon seeing that quicksilver flash of the blade through the air was 'I'll slit your fucking throat.' Sam deflected the blade with his forearm and sent it clattering down to the pavement before it could kill him, but not before Dean heard his short, pained intake of breath.

Dean's thoughts lose the shape of words altogether when he heard that sound. He seized Gordon's shoulder, whirled him around, and drove his fist into Gordon's nose, then into his abdomen. The sound that Gordon made on both counts was the most satisfying that Dean had ever heard. Had he even remembered that he was holding a knife at that point, he was afraid later that he might have used it.

Gordon made a growling noise and, grabbing Dean by the back of his neck, dragged him down so that he could bring his knee up hard into Dean's stomach. Dean felt all of the air leaving his lungs in a loud whoosh and barely managed to keep his balance at all as he staggered backwards. He went down to his knees in spite of himself when Gordon followed that up with a sharp chop to the back of his neck, sending swarms of black spots flying before his eyes. He could hear the sounds of a scuffle going on to his left even as he was struggling to get his breath back and rise to his feet again. Dean had only managed it halfway before Sam came back and dropped to his knees beside him. "You okay? I thought that he might have broken your neck at first."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm good." Dean swatted Sam's hands away and pulled an irritable face. "You?"

Sam grinned and held up his arm, where a long gap had been torn through the sleeve. When he rolled up his shirt, the plaster cast had a dent in it. "Stroke of luck, huh?"

"Sure was." Dean was not sure that his voice sounded all that sincere when most of his face still felt as if it had been submerged in ice. "Where's the bastard?"

"Bolted as soon as he had the chance." Sam rubbed at his arm. "We'll get him later."

"Later." Dean could hardly wait. He clapped Sam on the shoulder before he pushed himself painfully back up to his feet so that he could go and check on that point of this whole trip, Scotty himself. The kid had fallen to the ground from pain when the rock salt had peppered the side of his face, as it turned out, and not because Gordon had taken the opportunity to gut him like a fish. He had still had enough time to inflict a shallow wound, though, and Scotty was losing blood from it at a rate that Dean could already tell wasn't good. He was pushing himself into a sitting position against the side of the car when Dean reached him, touching at the blood on his face and chest and then staring at it as if he was not sure what it was.

"Here," Dean said gruffly as he leaned over the kid. He extended his hand downwards so that Scotty could take it. "Looks like you're about a pint low."

Scotty stared hard at Dean's hand before he shook his head. Dean looked at his face, pale in ways that blood loss alone could not account for, and thought that the kid would have run then and there if he had been able to stand. "Don't think that's a good idea."

Dean could feel the line being drawn down between his eyes. "Suit yourself, Scotty," he said, and took a step back, ignoring the concerned look that Sam was giving him as he did so. 'I'm not _wrong_.' Dean did not think that he was going to be able to throw that memory out of his head anytime soon, or stop giving the kid the fish-eye because of it.

"Scott," the kid said as he slowly, painfully pushed himself back to his feet, leaning on the car as he did so. He slipped once and would have fallen if Sam had not reached out and grabbed him quickly by the arm. The kid exhaled sharply when Sam did so, and Sam threw Dean a look. Whether that was because Dean had not moved such as a muscle when the kid had started to fall or because the kid had flinched so hard when Sam had touched him unexpectedly, Dean could not say. "Not Scotty."

"Fine. Scott." Dean scrutinized Scott hard, looking for those marks of darkness that he was supposed to be looking for in Sam, if not for the fact that Sam being his brother would probably blind him to all of those signs right up until the moment when Sam ripped out someone's throat. All that he saw from this supposedly new and objectively-viewed source, though, was a man in his very early twenties with the potential to be good-looking, examining the bloody slash in his chest and looking sicker by the minute. It was no small amount of blood that was spreading out across his shirt. "You have any idea why your buddy Gordo would be so interested in treating you like a nice salmon?"

"No." He was lying. "I was just leaving my therapist's office, and-" Scott froze, as if in his pain and distraction he had forgotten for a moment about the man who had nearly killed him. "Where is he?"

"Easy." Sam reached out and touched at the kid's shoulder as Scott looked again as if he was thinking of bolting. And once again, there was that flinch. Dean was cataloging them all. "He took off." Sam gave Dean a look as he said it, and Dean understood immediately. Gordon might be gone now, but he would be back unless he was dealt with. Gordon, after all, had not gotten what he wanted yet. Scott was still breathing.

Scott nodded, though he did not seem to be fully registering Sam's words. He was beginning to weave on his feet. Dean knew that it was probably time to stop talking and get this kid to a hospital before he bled out all over the pavement and it did not matter that they had interrupted Gordon, but he could not help himself. "You sure that you don't know why Gordon was after you there, Scott? Because I'm standing here thinking that you wouldn't make much of a poker player."

"_Dean_!" Sam hissed at him. He stared at Dean as if Dean had just suggested that Gordon had first noticed Scott due to Scott's unruly kitten-eating habits.

Scott ignored Sam and watched Dean instead, drawing his eyebrows together into a scowl that made him look older, old enough that Dean was no longer comfortable referring to him as a kid. "I didn't do anything wrong," he growled. It was almost believable. "I don't care what you-"

Dean was sure that Scott had quite the speech written up in his head, had his knees not then buckled suddenly and his eyes rolled back until they were showing nothing but eerie white. He wound up with an armful of the man as he tumbled forward. Dean grabbed at Scott's arm, for a few seconds encountering bared skin with his palm as he tried to keep Scott from falling down to the pavement. A shock almost like that of brushing up against a live wire while working on the Impala ran through Dean's arm before it subsided, and Dean nearly lost his grip. 'Yeah, kid,' he thought viciously as he adjusted his hold and threw Scott's arm across his shoulders, 'you didn't do a single thing to paint that target on your back.' He noticed that Sam was watching them both and said, "Come on. The longer we yap, the more he has to get pumped back into him." Rather than going all the way back to the Impala, Dean began fishing around in Scott's pockets for his keys. If they were saving his life, then he could get the bloodstains in his own car.

Sam took the keys when Dean handed them to him and unlocked the back door so that Dean could slide Scott inside, but he still did not stop giving Dean that look. That was Sammy's thinking face, his worrying face, and if Dean did not distract him soon then there was no way that he was going to be able to wiggle out from underneath it unscathed. "There something that you're not telling me, Dean?" he asked.

Dean made sure that Scott's feet were far enough inside the car so that Dean would not break his ankles when he slammed the door shut, hard enough to make the entire car shake. He straightened and flashed Sam a wide, reassuring smile. A big brother's smile. "Not a thing."

End Part One


	2. Chapter 2

Part Two

Dean was of the opinion that hunting Gordon down and beating the living hell out of him was the best possible way to complete their mission, but Sam had a different idea. Taking the man who thought that he was so far above human law even as he was killing humans and slamming him headfirst, violently, back into it…okay, maybe Sammy was able to phrase it differently. After feeling the errant jolt of electricity when his skin had been allowed to touch Scott's and jumping ahead to what Gordon would have done to Sam, Dean was not feeling inclined to wear the kid gloves.

Imagine his shock when it actually worked. Dean could feel Sam's eyes on the side of his face as the police put the cuffs on Gordon and then hurled him into the back of the waiting squad car. "So he gets a couple of years of the Oz treatment," he said in a gruff voice. "Man, that completely makes up for how pissed he's going to be when he gets out." Dean pursed his lips in mock sadness as he watched the officers putting their hands all over Gordon's weapons. "Shame for those to disappear into some evidence locker for all eternity." He turned so that he could flash Sam a bright, easy smile that Sam did not for a second appear to be buying. "Think you can mastermind a little breaking and entering, Slick?"

Sam made a sound that was close to a laugh. "The evidence walks, so does Gordon," he pointed out.

"Damn," Dean said. He clapped Sam on the shoulder before he turned back towards where the Impala was parked a short distance away. "Hell of a sweet collection, though." Dean could hear Sam's footsteps rustling through the undergrowth to the left of him and a little behind. The silence between them had weight and, even as Dean knew hat he was being ridiculous about it, a palpable menace. He didn't have to turn his head to know that Sam was gearing up for one of his patented speeches, complete with patented sad puppy eyes.

"So," Sam said as Dean was pulling the Impala's keys from his jacket pocket, "about how many times can I ask you if everything is really okay before you go popping me in the face again?"

Dean paused so that he could throw a grin over his shoulder. "Two," he said. "Three, if you really want to push it." From a distance, they could hear the sound of the sirens as the police took Gordon off to meet all of his new friends. With any luck, they would be the kind that liked to snuggle. Dean watched the pinpoints of light disappear through the trees and thought, 'Would have killed Sam, would have killed Sam,' over and over again, an endless loop that he could not seem to stop. Gordon would have killed Sam, and then Dean would have cheerfully killed Gordon. The only one among them who did not seem to have blood on his hands was the supposed future monster himself.

Something to think about.

"You trust me, right?" Dean asked Sam. Sam's eyes lit up, and Dean realized too late that he had given Sam far more fodder than he had intended. Kid was going to be _impossible_ from here on out.

"Yeah," Sam said slowly, as if he was waiting for a punch line.

"Then trust me when I say that I'll let you know when I've figured it out myself," Dean said as the Impala finally pulled away. He thought that he might have finally found a way.

---

Like any hospital worth a damn, Lafayette General pitched a fit when a patient tried to just walk out without being discharged into someone's care first. That went doubly so when the patient had forty-seven stitches put into his chest for the sole purpose of holding it together and keeping all of that new blood from leaking out. It had taken two extra pints to keep him from dying right there in the ER. Dean figured that he could cop to being a really shitty doctor without any great blows to his self-esteem.

However, when someone showed up with a bad line about being a cousin who happened to be passing through town and even had proof to back it up, they inexplicably became much more helpful. Dean had an idea that Scott had spent the previous four days making the nurses that much bitchier when they went in to ask for their annual raise. Scott still had room to look surprised when he saw Dean standing in the lobby.

"What, you didn't ask who was going to be driving you?" Dean leveled a finger at Scott while he took in a quick visual assessment. Four days of forced rest sure hadn't done any good, as Scott did not appear to have slept through any of it. The continuing gauntness of his face could probably be attributed to really crappy hospital food, but Dean did not think so. "Those are the survival skills that get find young men such as yourself all slashed up."

Scott stared at Dean hard as the nurse brought the wheelchair to a halt, as if he had never seen Dean before and had no idea what he was supposed to do about her now. Dean guessed that was not entirely out of the question, given the amount of blood that he had lost. After dropping Scott off at the ER, Dean had taken a peek at the stains in the back seat and had decided that he was doubly glad the Impala had been spared.

Surprise, surprise. "Dean," Scott said slowly as the nurse wheeled him outside to where the car was waiting. There would be no bleeding on the inside of this car. "The other guy called you Dean, right?"

Scott must have come back into consciousness for a few moments on the way to the hospital, long enough to catch part of the raging argument that had been taking place. "Got that, did you?" Dean said gruffly as he unlocked the passenger door for Scott and walked around to the driver's side. Scott stood up from his wheelchair and leaned up against the Impala without actually getting in. Neither, Dean noticed, did he ask for the nurse to stay. "Dean Winchester."

"The other guy didn't like you very much," Scott mused as he leaned up against the car and watched Dean with those alert dark eyes.

Dean snorted out a laugh. "Yeah, well, that's a brother thing. You gonna get in or not?"

Scott took a step back from the car, and Dean could not help but feel a little relieved. His own hands had been on the top of the car at the same time that Scott had been resting his bare forearms across it; there was no telling how far that creepy-ass power of Scott's could carry. "I don't know who you are."

"And yet you come all of the way outside the hospital with me and sent the only witness back inside," Dean said cheerily, watching Scott's eyes widen as he realized this. "That takes us right back to the issue of survival instincts. You don't have any, and unless you get some the next hunter who comes along is going to take your head right off of your shoulders. I don't feel like following you around for the rest of your life."

Scott offered Dean a soft smile over the top of the car. It probably would have been much more endearing if the rest of him had not been so creepy-ass and haggard-looking. "A public service, then," he said, and damned if there was not a note in his voice saying that he was smarter than Dean had given him credit for. Not _too_ smart, but then Dean would have fallen down in shock if even Stephen Hawking had been able to figure out the real reason that he was doing this. A little healthy human lust wasn't a complete lie, either, so Dean shrugged and let the grin that had been melting resolve and parting thighs since he was fifteen transform his face.

"Well, I can't put everyone else on hold while I'm saving your ass over and over again," Dean said, and didn't let the grin fall away. "All of the things that go bump in the night are just waiting for me to bump back, and they get lonely when they're left all alone."

Scott stared at him hard, all glass-cutting angles and demon-black eyes, and Dean was convinced in that moment that he had him. Was sure that the kid would be a fool to pass over self-preservation in favor of whatever it was that he had tying him down here. If there was one thing that Dean knew, it was that Scott was sunk into this every bit as deeply as he and Sam were, maybe even deeper. Sammy had at the very least stopped having the dreams, most nights. Sammy was not the one who looked like a shell-shocked refugee from a war movie.

A moment later, Dean realized that Scott was a fool.

"Thanks, but no thanks," Scott said, slapping once at the hood of the Impala as he stepped back. It probably would have been more impressive if he had not been wobbling on his feet. Clearly, whoever had decided that two pints was enough should have knocked him up to two and a half just to be on the safe side. "I'm not going to run away. I'm going to deal with my problems." He had conviction in his voice to spare, almost enough to cover the fact that he could use about ten thousand more calories and a solid week of sleep.

"Really." Dean leaned further across the car and laced his hands together. It was not until Scott blinked and took a step backwards that Dean realized that he had dropped the grin altogether and let his real expression show, the hunter's expression. It was getting hard to keep that one under control, these days. Dean was only waiting for the moment when he let it slip in front of Sam, and then all hell would break loose. If even half of what Dad had told him and the dark suspicions that Dean had been unable to stop from coalescing in his mind since then were true, then it could very well mean literally.

Dean pushed both this thought and as much of his plan as he was able out of his mind so that they would not betray his face any further. Leaning further across the hood of the Impala, he deliberately unlocked his hands and placed them flat against the car in a gesture that was meant to be non-threatening. "Let's be real here," he said. Scott lifted his chin slightly and did not come any closer, but neither did he go streaking back into the hospital so that security could come out and deal with the man with the schizophrenic face. That made him either much tougher or much dumber that Dean had previously given him credit for. He would wait to see how Scott responded to the whole pitch before he whittled himself down to one answer over the other. "Dealing with your own problems means dumping the cheating girlfriend-or boyfriend, as the case may be," Dean added, since Scott had not seemed entirely adverse to going there when he had thought that Dean's motive was sex. Scott narrowed his eyes a tick and made no move to go either forward or back. If Dean's face was even half as intense as he felt that it must be, then they were right back to square one and the issue of this kid having no survival instincts at all. No wonder he had people trying to gut him; he would probably give Springheel Jack a ride home from work. "Dealing with your problems is paying off your credit cards, buckling down and studying, even kicking a really nasty smoking habit. Dealing with your problems does not mean coping with homicidal maniacs who want to gut you like a trout and then use your lower intestine as a festive party decoration."

The imagery had its desired effect. Scott blanched even whiter. Rather than taking a step closer towards Dean and thus the homicidal maniac who appeared to be on his side, however, he moved back towards the hospital. Dean blew out a long stream of air through his nose and did not try to turn his face back towards a reassuring smile, knowing that it was pointless. "Where's your dad?" he asked instead.

Scott froze. Even though the high points of color that rose in his cheeks said that the stillness was born of anger rather than fear, Dean could not shake the image of a rabbit that had darted out into the headlights. It jarred against everything else that Dean both knew and suspected about the kid, and he tried to throw it out of his head as swiftly as was possible.

"What are you talking about?" Scott asked in a soft voice. Dean didn't miss the undercurrent of anger that had begun to run through it between one moment and the next. His boy Scott had a temper. The real reason that Dean was standing here and doing this had never weighed more heavily on his mind. "What does my father have to do with anything?"

"Seems weird, is all, a father not coming to see his son or even pick him up from the hospital after he nearly dies," Dean said. He barely waited for the betraying flicker to move through Scott's eyes before he continued. "Unless he caught you selling the neighborhood kids on Ebay or setting old ladies on fire, no father just leaves his son in the lurch like that." Dean let Scott's sullen silence stand as his confirmation. He let out a low whistle. "So you never let him know that you had been hospitalized in the first place. There's self-reliant and then there's _psychotic_, brother, and I don't think that I need to tell you which side of the line that you're standing on."

Scott still looked sullen and upset, but he also wasn't high-tailing it back across those final few steps that would take him out of Dean's reach. By this point, Dean was willing to lay down a fat wad of cash that he wouldn't. He sighed again and wished that he had Sam there with him, Sam who would flash that sincerity, would allow Scott a glimpse or two into his own sob story, and would have Scott clambering into the back seat to join their road trip so fast that he would be lucky if he didn't rip out his stitches.

Then again, Dean amended, if Sam knew why Dean was here, then he would like as not hit the roof so hard that it would be Sam's ass that spent the next four days in the hospital instead.

"I called him as soon as I came to and told him that I was taking off for a few days to get my head together," Scott answered at last in a hollow voice. "He's done enough worrying about me as it is, and I didn't-" Scott seemed to realize that he was on the verge of saying too much and cut himself off, making a savage chopping gesture with one hand. Dean did not think that Scott even realized what he was doing, but Dean saw, and he understood.

'You didn't want to bring your dad anywhere near you because you know that you've got a target painted on your back, don't you, Scott?' Dean thought. 'You have people coming after your ass and you know why, even if you're not feeling particularly chatty about it. You wanted to keep your dad away in case Gordon took a second stab at you and decided to wipe out the whole bloodline at a go.' It was a far more selfless thought than Dean had expected to be able to attribute to the kid. It made him uneasy and hopeful at the same time.

"You didn't think that you're old man was going to worry because you were disappearing for days on end into some kind of vision quest that was probably going to turn into a bender?" Dean asked, a gentleness that he had not planned for entering his voice. He coughed into his hand to cover it.

Scott glanced up at Dean's face for a moment, then back towards his own feet. "Lesser of two evils," he muttered. He stumbled for a moment before he was able to pronounce the word 'evil', leaving Dean's second or so of indecision to flee somewhere where it would not be soon found again.

"That's messed up," Dean said bluntly, and offered up the grin again when Scott raised his head to glare at him. Scott seemed somewhat less inclined to believe it this time around. "You want to want to know an even less one? Stop lying, and maybe you'll stop getting stabbed."

For the first time, something of a real personality, something other than sulking anger, flashed through Scott's eyes. Dean caught himself looking at the man that Scott must have been before the demon had started sliding its hooks into him, and what he saw made it hard to shove secondary motives out of his mind.

"Wow, that's brilliant," Scott said in a dry voice. "You should be a head of state, you have that kind of genius going on upstairs."

Dean surprised the both of them with a real grin. "I tell myself that daily," he said. "You know what else? I think I have a pretty good idea of why you're being hunted, and I think that you have a pretty good idea, too."

Scott went very still again: the rabbit in the headlight, the fox at the moment when it realized that the dogs had its scent. His right hand gave a betraying twitch, very slight. It was the only hint that he had any idea what Dean was talking about. Too bad that, so far as Dean was concerned, he might as well have had a spotlight trained on him. "That guy wanted my wallet," he said in a colorless voice. As part of that whole developing survival instincts thing, Dean decided, the very first step was going to be in teaching Scott how to lie.

"Sure," Dean agreed. Scott's eyes narrowed immediately. "He wanted my brother's wallet, too. And the wallets of a couple of other people around the country. Their wallets are all a tiny bit different from yours, but still. You're not the only person in the world with a wallet that you don't want."

For several long moments, Scott did nothing else other than look Dean up and down before he finally said calmly, "That is the worst metaphor that I have ever heard."

Dean scowled and scrubbed his hand over his hair. "What do you want? I slept through most of high school." He paused long enough to be sure that Scott was not going to bolt before he added, wishing like hell that he had Sam's easy way of getting people to do what he wanted, "It's true, though, the part about the other people."

"Are you crazy?"

"Are you?"

That pulled Scott up short faster than anything else that Dean could have said, he could tell. Scott wavered on his feet again, indecision this time rather than physical weakness. Finally, he whispered in a voice so low that Dean had to cock his head to one side and lean forward in order to hear it, "What could these other people do?"

"Visions," Dean said, sure that he was giving away too much but unable to stop himself all the same, knowing that this might be his best and only chance of reeling the kid in. If he was putting Sam in any further danger, then he would take care of it. "Telekinesis, mind control. We haven't met an actual firestarter yet, but I figure it's only a matter of time." Scott betrayed himself with the most subtle of twitches, and Dean felt one of his eyebrows go up. "Unless I'm meeting one right now."

"No." Scott shook his head and then peered at Dean. Dean could see in him the desire to spill his secret like a physical ache, but still the kid held out. Just when Dean was losing patience and about to snap, Scott blurted, "Close. I can…I'm like a human battery. I can electrocute things when I touch them."

That jolt that he had felt as Scott passed out. He might have come much closer to dying than he had realized. Dean drew in his breath. "Okay," he said in a voice that was much calmer than what he actually felt. Scott's eyes narrowed. Dean was sure that Scott had heard that particular tone of voice many times before, usually right before he was tried if he had tried the latest in anti-psychotics. "Can you control it?" 'And do you want to?'

If Scott did have any psychic abilities that so many of the demon's special kids seemed to sport, then he didn't see fit to show it. His face showed only the most naked gratitude that Dean had ever seen before. If all that it took to get this kid's trust was for someone to believe him, then Dean could not believe that he had not been eaten alive years before Gordon had ever come upon him.

"No," Scott said. Something inside of Dean turned to ice, but if he showed it on his face then Scott did not notice. "Not…not really. I can turn it on, and I can turn it off."

It was not trust, Dean realized a bare second later. He had been wrong. It was close, though. It was wanting to trust, and that was nearly the same thing.

"You want to learn?" Dean asked, even though he had no idea if that was a promise that he could even begin to keep. Figure out how to save this kid, and through that figure out how to save Sammy. Everything would be all right after that. Dean would make it so.

Scott bit his lip so hard that Dean was sure that he was going to tear a hole through his skin before he nodded once and lunged across the distance separating him from the Impala at a sprint, as if he was afraid that he would change his mind if he was given the opportunity to think about it. He winced as he dropped into the Impala's passenger seat and slammed the door after himself. Those stitches would not enjoy being jostled that much. "Two weeks," he said. "And only because I've tried everything else." Those eyes moved Dean's way as Dean took the driver's seat and finally started the car. They were naked of lust and filled instead with anxiety, and the fact that Dean wanted to see what the pupils looked like when they were dilated with desire probably made him an altogether awful person, all other things considered. He didn't think that he cared.

Hell, if Scott was even staying suspicious enough to give conditions to the guy who had saved his life, then maybe Dean had less ground to cover than he had guessed. He grinned as the car pulled away from the curb. "Deal."

"And we give me time to tell my dad where I'm going," Scott said. The look that he darted at Dean from beneath his lashes was nearly shy as he admitted, "He's done enough worrying about me."

Dean loosened his grip on the steering wheel before he hurt himself and massaged at his knuckles briefly. All that he said was, "Family's important."

End Part Two


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

Sam was busy on his laptop, looking for possible jobs, and barely glanced up when he heard the motel door open. "Took you long enough," he began, and then snapped his mouth shut when he saw the figure who was trailing in after Dean. "Hi. Only one person left. I guess I was only expecting one person to come back, too." Sam quirked an eyebrow up as he looked towards Dean, his entire body saying that the explanation had better be a good one. And Sammy didn't think that he and Dad had anything in common.

One of Scott's prescriptions had been a painkiller. Dean wouldn't have figured the kid to succumb to anything weaker than an elephant tranquilizer, if the number of prescriptions that they had collected from his house was anything to go by, and he would have been wrong. Already the kid was stumbling towards one of the beds, bleary-eyed and soft. Dean watched him go for just a beat too long before he turned back to Sam.

"You always wanted a little brother, right, Sam?" he asked, clapping Sam's shoulder. Sam answered by taking a long, slow look at all of the weapons that they had scattered around the room. His eyebrow went up even higher. If Sam didn't watch out, it was going to meet his hairline and never come down again.

"I wanted a dog," Sam said flatly.

Dean looked towards Scott, sprawled out across the bed that was supposed to be Dean's. Yeah, they had a real badass future threat on their hands, a part of Dean's brain whispered sarcastically, while another part merely folded its arms over its chest and glared. "Well, he's drooling," he said. "Scratch him behind his ears and he might kick his leg, too."

"Dean," Sam said in a firm tone. He didn't look like a badass future threat, either. Dean felt his lips press into a firm line and looked down before Sam could see the expression and get that bloodhound look again. Sam would not get to that point. Dean would not allow it. It was going to be just that simple.

"Dude's a living battery," Dean replied shortly. He lowered his eyes from Sam's and took a seat on the edge of his bed, under the pretense of cleaning a gun. He had to push one of Scott's legs out of the way before he could do so. Scott rolled over onto his back and made a sleepy noise without opening his eyes. Dean had been joking when he had offered Scott to Sam as a pet, but Scott looked like he would not say no to a belly rub. Strip away all of the bullshit along with his consciousness, and he even looked innocent. Dean sighed and rubbed at his eyes.

"Can't leave him wandering around without knowing how to control it," he finished. In spite of all Dean's best efforts to keep his face blank, Sam was still getting that bloodhound look. "People could get hurt."

"So your plan is?" Sam asked. He was standing in front of Dean, arms folded over his chest and gaze bouncing back and forth between Dean and Scott. The expression on his face was not, Dean noted with a certain wry amusement, that of a happy Sammy. Christ, Sam might even think that he was going to all of this trouble for an extended booty call. 'Yeah, like I need to work that hard.'

Scott turned over in his sleep and flung out his arm so that his hand was brushing against Dean's back, in the small exposed patch of skin between Dean's shirt and his jeans. Dean very manfully kept himself from either leaning further back into the touch or jumping right out of his skin. It was a shame that he could not let Sam know what was really going on, because Dean was fairly proud of his self-control there.

"Extended road trip," Dean said finally. "We take him on jobs until he figures out how to get his powers under better control. Then he goes on his way."

"He's not a hunter," Sam said.

"Maybe that's not such a bad thing," Dean said. He knew that they were both thinking of Gordon and his headlong rush into the dark side.

Sam looked away. "We'll waste time keeping him safe instead of watching what we should be hunting."

'Could be keeping other people safe from him, too,' Dean thought but did not say. If there was one thing that he knew for sure, it was that Sam would throw the shit fit to end all shit fits if he knew that Dean was planning on using Scott as a living and breathing experiment, cannon fodder that spoke in the service of saving Sam himself. Scott shifted and touched Dean's back. Dean maintained eye contact with Sam and did not blink.

Sam sighed, finally. "I'm not sharing my bed with him," he said.

Dean took a peek over his shoulder at Scott. The dark circles were still beneath his eyes, inky smudges that looked as if he had been struck, but the haunted look was gone. Dean had been right. There was a good-looking man there. He exhaled and turned back around. He hoped that his eyes were hooded enough to keep Sam from realizing what was really lurking beneath the surface.

"The bathtub looks comfy," he said brightly.

"You're not putting the assault victim in the bathtub," Sam said. The corners of his mouth twitched up for a moment. Dean was still not convinced that Sam did not think that he was doing all of this in order to get laid. Yeah, he might need to rethink his policy of merciless teasing every time that Sam disappeared with something long-legged and pretty, if this was what Sam turned around and did with that role model.

Sam went back to his laptop, apparently determined to ignore whatever bizarre flirting rituals that he thought were taking place, though the twist of his mouth remained amused. Dean sighed and looked back towards Scott once more. Asleep, the shadows were not in evidence. Dean reached out and touched at Scott's wrist, was not sure if he was relieved or disappointed when there was no answering electric jolt.

---

Dean had not been sure that he would be able to sleep at all, with Sam sniggering incessantly in the background and Scott sleeping so deeply that Dean had almost felt dirty as he had shifted Scott over to his side of the bed. Somehow, Dean still managed it, dropping off his exhaustion for a few hours and waking up disoriented in a room that was as black as pitch. He reached blindly for a weapon on instinct and did not stop until he felt the flush of a warm body against his back, shocking heat even through two layers of clothing. Dean took a breath, remembered where he was, and did not relax.

Scott shifted in his sleep and rolled to the other side of the bed, muttering something beneath his breath that sounded like "away". All prospect of sleep gone, Dean propped himself onto one elbow and stared down at Scott. His features were entirely hidden by shadow. By glancing over his shoulder, Dean saw that Sam's were as well. Good. Dean knew exactly what Sam would say if he knew what Dean aw doing, using a person like this, and he also knew that Sam would never consider his own safety to be an acceptable trade.

Well. They were brothers. That did not mean that they had to know every little secret about each other.

That was probably a good plan, Dean decided a second later as Scott turned back over with a speed that no one who was still half asleep should have been able to manage. Dean saw a flash of those dark cipher eyes in the gloom as a truck rolled by and flashed its headlights through the window, less than a second before Scott kissed him. Scott's mouth was every bit as warm as the flesh of his chest had been moments before, and not separated from Dean by frustrating layers of clothing. Dean made a soft sound from the back of his throat and pt his hand against the side of Scott's face, swearing to himself that he was going to push Scott away. At any moment. Because there was sex, and Dean was _always_ ready for that, but he had a crazy thing about preferring that his partner be in his or her right mind at the time. Or at the very least that they were equal amounts of drunk.

Yeah. Any moment.

Scott's tongue flicked against the roof of Dean's mouth and pulled another sound from his throat before Dean's hand found its way around to the back of Scott's neck. It flexed and Scott sighed, but Dean used the movement to pull Scott away instead of giving a massage.

"What are you doing, man?" Dean whispered in the dark. He had not pulled Scott away as far as he needed to, because pushing Scott out of the bed entirely probably would not have been far enough. Their foreheads were still resting against each other. Dean felt the heat from Scott's body through the dark and wondered if his lips were swollen yet. That was probably not a line of thought that was going to stop his blood from flowing into inconvenient places any time soon.

"I can't take these dreams anymore," Scott whispered back. His voice was still husky and fogged with sleep. It sounded as if he had spent a good amount of time yelling. Even knowing that it was probably nothing more than residue from the pain medication, Dean could not keep his breath from hitching. "If I'm tired enough, I don't dream."

Being informed that he had been chosen for the sake of being close and warm enough should have gone further towards cooling off Dean's sex drive. It certainly did a hell of a job on his ego. He grit his teeth and pulled Scott far enough back so that they were no longer touching one another, discovering that this had only a marginal effect, before he asked, "What dreams?"

The muscles beneath Dean's hand tensed. Though Scott's features were wrapped in gloom, Dean still had a pretty good idea of what his expression must be like. "Why do you want to know?" Scott asked, and Dean thought, 'Fuck.' If only Sam's visions had taken them to save an idiot.

"The goodness of my heart," Dean replied. He had been aiming for a certain wry irony, but instead he heard a darkness within his voice that should have warned any reasonable person to back away as quickly as they were able.

Lucky for him, then, that Scott was running on a severe lack of anything that resembled real sleep, on too many painkillers and too much stress, and on survival instincts that made a bunny look ferocious. "Liar," Scott muttered, and kissed Dean again. He was good at it.

God_damn_ it, Dean really hated that morality thing. If only Scott was running on actual sleep, or they were both drunk. He tightened his grip on the back of Scott's neck for a moment before he cupped his face again, palm rasping against the stubble. "You're tired and confused," Dean started. 'And probably a little high, and maybe a little evil,' Dean's mind finished for him. Or even a lot, on both counts. Either way, it was going to be one of the very few times when Dean turned down sex. He figured that he could still count all of those occasions on one hand starting when he was fifteen, so it worked out. "I'm not going to help you do something that you'll regret."

Scott made a hollow sound that may have been a laugh, and under different circumstances may have even been amused. "Don't you ever get sick of being good, Dean?" Scott asked.

"Do you?" Dean's thumb brushed against Scott's lower lip. Scott's breath hitched; Dean thought for a moment that Scott was about to sweep Dean's thumb into his mouth. If that happened, then they were going to have to find a more private place very quickly, and morality be damned.

"It's harder than it looks," Scott replied before he pulled away and turned over again. Dean's eyes had adjusted to the dark enough so that he could make out the line of Scott's spine in the shadows, unyielding with tension. Either angry at Dean or angry at the whole fucking world; Dean had a feeling that Scott had spent so much time in the second place over the past few weeks that he didn't know how not to be any longer.

"Yeah, I get that," Dean said finally. If Scott was thinking of letting a betraying twitch crawl through his shoulders, then he stopped it before it was able to get too far. Dean rolled over onto his back and stared at the cracks in the flaking ceiling until dawn began to creep through the window.

---

Dean must have dozed off again, for he woke up with full sunlight streaming through the window and with the sound of the door being slammed shut. There was a certain glee in the noise, as impossible as it should be. "Hey, Sam," Dean muttered, rolling over and throwing his arm over his eyes. If he had not been able to find a weapon fast enough when Scott had startled him awake the night before, then he sure as hell could not find one quickly enough to throw a knife at his brother's head.

The next sound that Dean heard was that of a coffee cup being set down on the table beside his head. Well. He might forgive Sammy, after all. Dean moved his head so that he was peeking out from beneath his arm with one eye and found that it really was coffee, and not just a cruel joke. "Your stock is growing by leaps and bounds," Dean grunted before he sat up and reached for the cup."

"Morning, sunshine." Sam sounded downright chipper. He was lucky, Dean decided then, that he was not getting a cup of coffee thrown at his head. "You look like you slept well."

Dean grunted again and realized for the first time that the other half of the bed was empty, though the sheets were still warm. He would hear water running in the bathroom. "You're doing this because I torture you whenever you snag a date, aren't you?" he asked before he took a long drink of the coffee. It scalded the roof of his mouth, but he was so exhausted that he did not care.

"You assume that torturing you can't be its own fun," Sam replied before he tossed a newspaper into Dean's lap. Dean raised his coffee so that he would not get splashed and looked curiously at what appeared to be the usual rural bylines: things wanted, things for sale, weddings, funerals, and feuds. Dean quirked an eyebrow as he looked up at his brother.

"Something that I'm supposed to be seeing here?" he asked.

Sam rolled his eyes and said, "I'm going to attribute that to the lack of sleep," before he reached out and tapped at a small article, tucked down towards the bottom left corner as if even the newspaper itself was hoping that no one would notice it.

Dean leaned forward and squinted, "Well, I'll be damned," he said. "Think she just slipped?" The charitable interpretation falling from his lips shocked even Dean, and he knew from the expression on his brother's face that Sam was shocked to hear it.

Sam's face twitched, but it was not a smile. For a moment he looked as if he was even in pain. "I don't think that she's slipped a day since she was turned." It was hard to believe that he had even been teasing Dean moments before.

"Fuck." Dean started back down at the newspaper and felt a twinge of something that wanted to be regret, but could not quite get there. Some people-some _things_-could not find it within themselves to change. It was a hard old world. Dean still tasted bile, slick and sour, against the back of his throat. "Sorry if this is going to put a kink in your relationship, but we have to take out your girlfriend."

Sam did not make the usual snappish remark or even roll his eyes at the classification of Lenore as his girlfriend. She had been so strange and remote, so far removed from anything that approached human, that even the memory of her could shake them off with ease. A moment later, Dean realized that it was only a distraction, not a genuine acceptance of the job that they needed to do; Sam was once again wearing his inquisitive hunter's look. 'Fuck,' Dean felt like saying again as he realized that he must have let something slide across his face.

"What's going on?" Dean did not care that it was looking more and more as if Scott was going to have to be put down in the same way that Lenore was going to have to be put that down. At that moment he was completely ready to kiss Scott, and for a much different reason than the one that had tempted him the night before. He turned so that he could flash Scott a wide, easy grin. A frown line drew itself between Scott's eyes, and he took a small step backwards before he halted himself. Kid got smarter by the minute.

"Congratulations," he said. "You're going on your first job."

End Part Three


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

The newspaper article that Sam had seen while he was out getting coffee and breakfast for them and that had gotten him so riled up was short and to the point. Dean had a feeling that the reporter who had written it could sense all of the pieces that did not fit together every bit as much as Sam and Dean could, and so only wanted to pout the whole mess out of her head as soon as possible. In Leistville, Ohio, the local dairy farmers were having a harder and harder time meeting demand, and for once not because the big factory farms were breathing down their necks. Something was killing the milk cows while they grazed at night, and that something was not a pack of neighborhood dogs gone feral or even a group of hungry timber wolves who had wandered far from home. Not unless dogs and wolves had starting slitting throats with what the veterinarian who had examined each animal described as a serrated weapon, collecting all of the blood, and then hightailing it out of there without disturbing even an ounce of meat.

It had the look of Lenore and her group of quasi-tamed vampires written all over it, and if the article had ended there Dean might even have felt relieved. Any sign that she could change and keep her promises boded well for the chances that Scott and thus Sam would turn out all right. The way that the story had ended, though…Dean had become used to those sudden urges to clench his hands around the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white, grind his teeth against each other until he didn't have any enamel left at all. He didn't even notice that he was doing it now until his hands or his jaw began to ache. If the story had ended there, he knew exactly what would have happened. He would have muttered a curse beneath his breath and then said that Lenore's mess was her own damned fault and she could find her own way to wiggle out of it, while Sam would have made the biggest and shiniest eyes that he was capable of as he insisted that Lenore was not a threat, was not hurting anyone and that they had a duty to help her out if they could. Dean would have grumbled beneath his breath but not put up all that much of a fight, secretly glad that all of Sam's instincts were still pointing in their hyper-moral Sammish direction, and off they would go. Warn Lenore that she and her people were getting sloppy and that it would be a good idea for them all to get out of town sooner rather than later, distract any hunters that might be in the area already, and call it a day. Dean would have felt unsettled about it for days afterwards, still unsure that they ought to be helping Lenore's kind, while Sam would be pleased for weeks.

That was not how the story ended.

After nearly a month of cattle mutilations, a sheriff's deputy had turned up dead in his home. No signs of a struggle and no signs of a forced entry, but the man's throat had been slit so badly that he had nearly had a second mouth in the crime scene photos that Sam had managed to dig up. His blood had been missing, scarcely a drop wasted.

Dean had to force his hands to uncurl from around the steering wheel before he wound up hurting himself. He snuck a glance sideways at Sam, who was chewing at his lower lip and looking as if he was in a place far, far away. He had been wearing that look ever since he had read the newspaper article; Dean had considered himself lucky that he had gotten Sam moving and into the car at all.

Sam thought that _he_ was troubled by the news that Lenore had given in to her nature and was killing again. He had no idea what was going through Dean's mind. 'And he never will,' Dean thought, feeling his mouth settling into the kind of grim, angry line that he was starting to wear like a second skin.

Scott had settled into the backseat and seemed to have made a nest for himself back there, halfway reclining back against Sam's side of the car and putting his feet up against the window on Dean's. He had answered Dean's glare with a smile so pure and angelic that it was hard to believe that he was able to kill someone by touching them and then thinking really hard. Scott still did not look as if he had slept any more than Dean had. The marks beneath his eyes were now so dark that he almost looked as if he had been punched in the face. Perhaps picking up on the unspoken tension that was filling the car, he had remained nearly silent since they had started out and was now occupying his time with looking at the newspaper article that had started their road trip in the first place. Scott had to be one hell of a slow reader, because the article was short and the motel was nearly two hours back. Or maybe he just could not believe what he was seeing. Dean only wished that he was experiencing that kind of problem.

"So, you guys," Scott began, and then stopped himself. Dean glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Scott's expression was uncertain, his lips moving as if he knew what he wanted to say but was struggling against a concept so large that he was not able to force his mind to sign off on it. Dean thought that one of the words that he was fighting so hard to say was 'vampire'. 'Evil' might have been another one.

'Get ready to wrap your mind around a whole bunch more,' Dean thought in Scott's direction, not unkindly. 'You're a part of this now, whether you like it or not.'

"You guys know this woman?" Scott said finally. Dean thought that Scott stumbled for a moment before he was able to call her a woman, and his lips lifted into a small smile. "And you didn't, you know-" Scott made a gesture that would have been obscene under other circumstances. It wasn't making it any easier for Dean to put his eyes back onto the road and keep from running them all into a tree. "Put a stake into her?"

"She wasn't a threat to anyone," Sam said. He had joined them back on Planet Earth, at least, his expression becoming sharp and focused before he turned to face the window. The set of his shoulders said that it would be monumentally stupid for anyone to poke at him right now. Therefore, Dean knew that he had no other choice but to give him a stab or two. "She had changed."

Dean snorted and felt his knuckles tighten around the wheel again. He did not sigh and force himself to relax until Sam had twisted back far enough to flash him a dirty look. "Sure she did," Dean said in a voice that was too cheery to possibly be real. In the backseat, Scott tensed up and finally took his feet down from the window as he straightened in his seat. Sam kept looking at Dean with a black expression. "She volunteered to wear a leash just long enough to get herself out of town, and then she couldn't wait to shake it off. People don't change."

Dean did not realize that he had slipped and given Sam that potential ammo to throw back at him, referring to Lenore as a person rather than a thing, until the words were already out of his mouth. Luckily for him, Sam looked too angry to have noticed the slip. Even better, Dean happened to be glancing into the rearview mirror and noticed Scott's face as he reacted to what Dean had just said. Skin that did not look as if it had had a lasting relationship with the sun in quite some time went even paler, pushing him nearly to the point of outright translucence, and those dark eyes were cast down before they could meet Dean's for more than a second or two. Scott's mouth twisted; he threw the newspaper into the floorboard at his feet.

It seemed like a good idea to let the conversation die after that. Dean focused on driving, on not breaking either his hands or his jaw through tension, while Sam was focusing on glaring sullenly out the passenger window. Scott, so far as he could tell, was concentrating mainly on not pissing anyone off. After a while, he took one of the pain pills that the hospital had provided for him, settled back down into the seat as if he planned on making it his bed from there on out, and put his feet up in the window once more. Dean swore that he was only letting Scott get away with that because there were likely to be torn stitches if he kicked his ass for it. He pushed away the voice inside of his head which said that Scott was not likely to be around long enough to get his stitches out and then, nearly worse, the one beneath it which said that he just might be.

Frequent glances in the rearview mirror let Dean know that Scott never went any deeper than a doze, even with the aid of some pretty heavy-duty painkillers working on his system. Even that much did not come peacefully. Dean was well aware that his own reflection in the rearview mirror did not look much better, and that circles like that did not come about as the result of one sleepless night.

Dean glanced back towards the road, only to notice that Sam was giving him a steady, unswerving stare, as if Dean was a bug in a jar and Sam was on the verge of shaking him to see what he would do. "That's creepy, Sam. Do your children of the corn impression on your own time."

Sam snorted and looked away, but not for long. "Something's up with you," he said. Half of the sentence was addressed to the side window, the other half to Dean himself when Sam twisted around to stare at him again. "Ever since Dad died."

"Yeah, and you think that just maybe that has something to do with it?" Dean's voice cracked like a whip across the interior of the car. He was surprised when Sam did not bleed as a result of it. In the backseat, Scott made a troubled sound and shifted once before he was silent again.

"No," Sam said. "I don't." He was not looking away, he was getting that fucking inquisitive look that he had been prone to ever since he was little, the one which said that he was going to work at you like a terrier until he gave in to your demands out of sheer fatigue. Dean felt a tightness growing in his chest. He clenched his hand around the steering wheel again, sure that Sam was noticing the gesture and at the same time not able to bring himself to actually care. "People deal in weird ways. They get drunk, they get in fights, they cry-"

"I swear to God, Sammy, if you make us have a moment, I will pull this car over and your ass can walk the rest of the way to Ohio." Dean was ready this time and was able to modulate his voice through the intense swell of anger that rode over him like a wave, white-hot and making the space behind his eyes feel tight. Sam's gaze flickered at the use of the diminutive, but that was all.

"Since you get drunk and get into fights, anyway, who the hell knows," Sam went on as if Dean had not spoken. "And the day you have a Lifetime crying jag is the day that I call Bobby and ask him to set up for an exorcism-"

"Thank God for that." With every step closer that Sam got to the actual truth, Dean felt something within his chest grow tight.

"Never heard of anyone dragging a complete stranger across the country based on a hunch, though," Sam went on. Dean had still not spoken. He didn't think that it was even necessary to hold up his end of the conversation any longer; Sam was wandering through his own head now. God help them all if Dean could not yank him out of there quickly. "There are easier ways to get laid."

"Jesus, Sam," Dean groaned, and swore that he would never say another word about any girl that Sam happened to meet in a bar or on a job. Hell, he wouldn't even say anything about all of the files on Sam's laptop that he knew damned well didn't come from his own libidinous wanderings.

Sam's lips quirked into a smile for only a second before it was swallowed by the worry again. "Oh, I haven't even gotten started," he said, causing Dean to worry even more by the fact that he was being so solemn. He was still wearing that thoughtful face. "Does this have something to do with me?" he asked.

"I lied before. _Now_ you're getting creepy," Dean told Sam in a tone that was probably more cheerful than the situation warranted, not bothering to look over at Sam. He ruined the effect a second later by glancing at Scott's sleeping form in the backseat.

"Ha," Sam said flatly. "I'm serious, Dean. Is it because he has powers?"

"You see Andy in this car with us?" Dean asked. Sam was silent. "There you go. He can tag along until he gets that battery of his under control. Then he's gone."

"Sure," Sam said, though his eyes were hooded and his tone was dubious. He looked out the passenger window again. Dean watched the tension in his brother's shoulders and knew without a doubt that Sam was only shelving his questions that were still rattling around the inside of his brain, not dismissing them permanently. They had been so driven by Sam and by Sam's powers and visions ever since Dad had died, this sudden burst of aggression that Dean was showing was probably blowing Sam's mind right now.

'If only you knew what it was like from my side over here,' Dean thought, and felt the urge to slam the heel of his hand against the steering wheel. Doing so would only attract Sam's attention and set off another round of questions all over again, and Dean was so goddamned tired.

He sighed, glanced into the rearview mirror again, and saw that Scott had woken up from his pill-guided haze again and was watching him. Dean had no way of knowing how long he had been awake and listening. He watched those dark deep eyes for several long moments before he had to look away again, or risk running all three of them off of the road.

---

They reached Leistville in the middle of the night, and Dean and Sam barely exchanged a look before deciding without needing words that the job could wait until the morning. They pulled into the first motel that they could find flashing a vacancy sign and stumbled into the lobby as a group, Sam and Dean in the lead with Scott in tow. Dean did not think that Scott had taken any more of his pain pills since he had awakened the last time, as he winced and placed his hand against this chest while he was emerging from the backseat. His eyes were clear and sharp, and they fell unswervingly towards Dean more often than they did not. Dean refused to look away each time, wondering what it was that Scott had dreamed that made him so willing to bear the stitches now.

"Hi," Dean said to the sleepy clerk inside, flashing his best and most brilliant smile when Sam and Scott had both proven that they were entrenched far too deeply in their own heads to be any help. The clerk brightened visibly under it and even raised her hand for a moment as if she meant to fluff at her hair. "Need a room for the night."

"Sure!" Her tone was far chirpier and more eager to please than Dean suspected it would have been if she had not seen him first. Well, it had its uses. He dialed up the grin even further. "Um." The girl glanced behind him, and her expression turned first surprised and then sly. Dean noticed a flush beginning to curl up her neck and then overtaking her ears. "How many beds?"

Every freaking time. "Two," Dean said. "We're _brothers_," he added when the girl's blush and eager look did not fade.

"Oh." Poor thing, she looked almost disappointed. Dean struggled for a moment not to hide a grin behind his hand. "With taxes, that'll be forty-two sixteen." She took the credit card that he handed to her, ran it, and then slid it back across the counter at him.

Dean took it and started to go back to Scott and Sam in the doorway before another thought turned him back. "Actually, we're here on a bit of a mission. Maybe you could help with that."

"Really?" The girl brightened immediately. In her bright, eager grin, Dean could not see what she hoped his mission was, but he thought that he had a pretty good idea. Man, if he had only met her when he was not in the middle of a job. "Yeah, I can help with that, maybe."

"We're looking for a house," Dean said.

The girl's face fell. "There's a realtor's office right down the street," she said. "Won't open until nine, but they can help you out."

Dean shook his head and made a reluctant tcching sound from between his teeth. "See, there's the problem. We're looking for a house for our father. He's retired, limited income, so we're going to be looking for a fixer-upper. Something that a realtor won't be pushing very hard."

The girl's face cleared. "There's the Thompson place about six miles out of town," she said. "Place is a real mess, but until a few years ago it was still rented out every once in a while. If the price is right, you could probably snag it."

"Great." That was exactly what Dean had been hoping to hear. "Is it being rented now?"

The girl's face screwed up for a moment before she shook her head. "Don't think so."

"Even better." Dean touched at the girl's hand and watched as her blush came back. "Thanks."

"Glad to help," the girl said as he started to turn away. She scrabbled at the receipt that Dean had signed and added, "Zeke."

At the door, Sam looked as if it was all that he could do not to laugh. It was happier than he had appeared in hours. Scott's face was unreadable, but his eyes gleamed and flashed. Dean allowed himself one long second before he gave in and answered his brother's grin.

"Nice," Sam said as they walked towards their room. "That girl is going to cry when you leave town."

Dean remembered her hungry look and nearly laughed as he slotted the key into the door and let them all into the room. "I don't think that she's the mourning type," he said dryly. "But now we know where to start. I'll bet you anything that Lenore and her people are holed up in that house." It was so easy to refer to them as people now.

The laughter fell from Sam's face to be overtaken by shadow. He banished it quickly, for what Dean supposed was Dean's own sake, but it had been there. "Yeah, probably," he said. "We can go out there tomorrow, finish it while they're sleeping. Quicker and less dangerous that way."

"You mean that you're going to kill them all," Scott said. He had been so quiet that Dean had nearly forgotten that he was there, if not for those eyes. Scott did not sound accusatory, but merely curious, as if he could not yet manage to wrap his brain around the fact that they were really going to do this. Dean spared a moment to wonder whether this was a good thing or a bad one for his project, before telling himself that Scott had only figured out a few days before that the world was such a dark and ugly place, after all. He might still be coping with the learning curve.

"They're evil," Dean said to Scott. "Killing evil is pretty much our job."

Sam looked even less happy now. "I'm going to take a shower," he said, tugging at his shirt and rubbing at his hair. "God, we need to find a laundry mat."

"Girl," Dean said to Sam's retreating back, all of the squabbling in the car forgiven.

Sam gave him an amiable middle finger to let him know that he heard the apology and accepted. "You're getting pretty rank yourself."

"I am not," Dean yelled as Sam shut the bathroom door. He looked at Scott. "I am not."

Scott was probably the person in the room best equipped to comment on Dean's odor or lack thereof, but he seemed more interested in taking a seat upon the edge of one of the beds and staring at Dean hard. Dean saw why the yellow-eyed demon would be interested in Scott within that look, whereas before had been working off of guesswork alone.

"You take your pills?" Dean asked him, hearing a roughness within his voice and doing nothing to try to temper it.

Scott shook his head and, eerily, did not break eye contact with Dean the entire time. "They make me dizzy," he said. "I'll stick with aspirin."

"Sounds like you'll be having fun."

Scott shrugged, dropped his eyes, became human again. Dean was glad of it. "I'll cope." The knee of his jeans remained the most fascinating detail in Scott's world for several seconds before he looked back up again. "Why am I on this road trip?"

"Because you'll hurt somebody if you don't learn how to control those powers of yours," Dean said easily, lie so smooth that he nearly believed himself. "And you don't want that." Without pausing to even realize what he was doing, he drifted closer, thinking, 'Do you?'

Scott tipped his head back so that he could continue to look Dean in the eye, exposing the long line of his throat. "No," he said. "I don't." Dean put his hand against the curve of Scott's neck where it joined his skull, stroked at the flesh and told himself that it was not a reward. Scott's skin was warm and his pulse was beating very quickly beneath the pads of Dean's fingers. "For someone who does your line of work," Scott continued in a calm voice that he ought to have been proud of, because it only shook slightly and around the edges, "you're a really terrible liar."

Dean neither released his grip on Scott's neck nor tightened it. "What do you mean?"

Scott grinned, and Dean's palm for a moment felt as if he had been zinged with static electricity. He had almost convinced himself that he was imagining it by the time that Scott went on, "You really know how to deal with my problem?" Another zing. It was still relatively gentle, but Dean was damned sure that he was not imagining it. He did not break Scott's gaze; he did not take his thumb away from Scott's neck, stroking slow circles over Scott's pulse point. When Scott swallowed, Dean both saw it and felt it against his skin. "You get people with problems like mine every day?"

Dean listened to the shower running and said, "You're not as different as you think."

Scott made a curious sound that was either a snort or a sigh and leaned, very slightly, into Dean's hand. "Yeah, I'm a dime a dozen," he said. Looking up at Dean from beneath his lashes, he added, "There are easier ways to get laid."

Dean winced. "You weren't supposed to hear that."

"Didn't figure that I was." Scott looked tired, and young, and so damned irresistible that Dean was ducking his head before he even realized what he was doing. Scott's lips were warm and he parted them eagerly for Dean, belying the surprised sound that he made from the back of his throat. Dean tightened his grip upon Scott's neck and pulled Scott up, more firmly onto his mouth, while Scott gripped at the front of Dean's shirt. It was not gentle. Their teeth clacked against one another and Dean swore that he made an actual growling sound from the back of his throat, realizing how much he had been wanting this. Every instinct that should have warned him away fell conspicuously silent.

Scott had been rising up from the bed so that he could better meet Dean's mouth, so that they were no longer pressed into an awkward crouch over one another. Parting for only a second so that the two of them could draw a breath, Dean shook his head and pushed Scott back so that he was lying flat across the bed. "Ow," Scott said mildly as his stitches pulled.

"Should have taken your pills," Dean said before he lowered his mouth onto Scott's again, their bodies now flush against each other. Dean pushed his hand beneath Scott's shirt and, being careful of the bandages and the heavy stitches that looped across Scott's chest, felt Scott's heart beating rapidly through his ribcage. He always took a moment to reorient himself when he was with a man rather than a woman, to all of these hard and somehow exotic angles in the place of lush curves. He cupped Scott's face and felt stubble rasping against his palm while Scott made an enthusiastic sound against his mouth. There were a few other things that were different in being with a man rather than a woman as well, and Dean groaned when he felt the most noticeable one pressing against his thigh. Every inch of skin that Dean was touching with his own bared flesh was tingling with what felt like jolts of out of control static electricity, until Dean's lips started to go numb.

"Stop that," he muttered. Dean pulled away so that Scott's face was only an inch beneath his own, the planes and angles wrapped in shadow to such an extent that the onyx of his eyes was the most visible part of him. They were nearly sharing breath.

"I can't," Scott said in a voice that was nearly as soft as Dean's own. He angled his head upwards so that he could kiss Dean again, but Dean felt as if a switch had been flipped, passing him from drunk into sober again. He listened to the shower running only a few yards away, to the traffic rumbling on the highway, to Scott's breath whistling in his ear.

"Nope," Dean said, and rolled away before he could reconsider. Glancing back at Scott, who was still sprawled out across the bed with swollen lips and an expression that would become glazed with one or two more touches in exactly the right place, was making it damned easy to reconsider. Dean took a deep breath and stood up from the bed. He felt as if he was going to come right out of his skin, and without even the excuse of electricity coursing through him any longer.

Scott continued to look dazed and out of sorts for a moment longer before he sat up and braced himself against the headboard, putting his palm against his chest as he got settled. His face had soon gone dark. "The fuck?" he asked, straightening furthering and not bothering to keep his voice down.

"This." Dean pointed first to himself and then to Scott. "Is not going to happen. I'm not going to take advantage of you." Which was a goddamned chivalrous load of bullshit far better suited to Sam than to himself. Dean knew that, but he had also gotten a good eyeful of the prescriptions that Scott had swept into his bag before agreeing to leave his house. He had then run the names through Google on Sam's computer. Scott had more issues than even Dean had supposed.

Scott let out a hollow laugh and ran his hand through his hair. "So you want to fuck me," he began. The way that he said it, like something filthy and beautiful at the same time, made Dean want to pin him down to the bed again. "But you won't, so that can't be the reason that I'm here, and be both know that you don't actually want to help me. What does that leave?" Damn it, Dean had gotten another thinker. Scott's face wrinkled up for a moment before clearing and, remarkably, assuming a hurt expression. "You want to see what he's saying to me."

"Who?" Dean asked automatically, stepping closer to the bed before he realized what he was doing.

Scott's face grew even darker. "You _fucker_," he seethed before he swung his legs over the side of the bed. He moved too quickly to catch up with the last, lingering effects of his blood loss and stumbled hard sideways, yelping and throwing out an arm to catch himself. Dean lunged forward on instinct to grab Scott before he could fall to the floor, but he moved too slowly. Scott wound up striking the bedside lamp inside. They had left it off during their hurried fumblings. As Dean watched, the light bulb flared into bright life before it exploded, throwing shards of glass out at them both. Dean and Scott had to yelp and turn their heads quickly to the side to avoid being blinded. For several seconds, the loudest sound in the motel room afterwards was that of their breathing.

"Yeah," Dean said finally. There was a sour taste on his tongue. "You don't need any help getting that under control at all."

Scott paused, breathing hard, and stared at what he had done. Dean thought that he might be sick for a moment before he released a shaky sigh and said, "Fax me your resume on dealing with this and we'll talk. Otherwise I'm going to stick with my other sources." The voice was much calmer than the rest of his demeanor would suggest; even at the distance of several feet, Dean could see that his hands were shaking.

Dean rubbed at his eyes and then reached over and flicked on the remaining lamp so that at the very least they would not be arguing in darkness. Scott sank back down to the bed as soon as the light touched him, as if he had not been able to relax as long as the shadows were shrouding him. He looked even younger than he had before, and Dean felt a pang of guilt. It would have been so much easier to think of Scott in terms of threat if his lips had not still been tingling.

"Does anyone tell you to do anything in these dreams of yours, Scott?" Dean asked. His voice was quieter and more gentle than he would have thought himself capable of, at that moment. The twitch that ran through Scott's shoulders said that he was responding to it, however much that he might wish that he was not.

Scott looked up finally. "Not a thing," he said flatly. Dean exhaled. Kid had a lot of talents. Lying was not one of them. That made things a hell of a lot more complicated, to be sure, and the near miss with sex had little to do with it.

The bathroom door opened to admit Sam, dressed in new clothes, amid a cloud of steam. He combed his fingers through his damp hair and looked around for his shoes. Sam's eyes only lingered over the broken glass on the floor for a second before he rolled his eyes and said, "I'm going for a walk."

Because people always took walks after midnight and after nearly a full day of driving around without breaks. Dean would have asked Sam if he was off to see if he could meet Lenore and talk some sense into her undead head before they were forced to cut it off, if he did not already know the answer. Dean rubbed his hands over his face tiredly and caught up with Sam just as his brother was pulling on shoes and reaching the door. "Sam, wait, do _not_ leave me alone-"

"Fix your problem, Dean," Sam said. Dean did not think that Sam was referring to Scott, or at least not entirely. "You don't want to talk about it, fine. I won't push any more." Bullshit, Dean thought, even though he was sure that Sam was sincere in the moment. Pushing was what Sam did. "So fix it." Sam slipped out the door without another word. Dean was at the very least gratified to see Sam was carrying a stake tucked within his jacket, so that one of them was not setting his brain to the side to go on a fool's quest.

"He sounds cranky," Scott pointed out helpful from the bed as soon as the door closed behind Sam. His lips, when Dean turned to look at him, were still swollen. That was not helping.

"Yeah," Dean said as he scrubbed his hand over his face again, "that's going around."

End Part Four


	5. Chapter 5

Part Five

If there was anything that Dean had learned by now, it was that sharing a bed with Scott while Scott was still in possession of those eyes and that mouth was a staggeringly bad idea. That came well before he added in the possibility of Scott being on his way to a serious Darth Vader level of evil or of boiling people's blood in their veins with one good orgasm. If there was anything else that he ought to know about by now, it was that his little brother was a sadist, for Sam both refused to let him switch beds or force Scott to sleep in the bathtub.

Scott had finally broken and taken two of his pills before he had crawled into bed, already looking as if he knew that he was going to regret this. Dean noted the larger than recommended dose and knew that Sam had noticed it, too, in the way that his brother's eyebrow crawled up, but Sam was in an annoyed mood and was retreating into his own head as a result. Dean had no doubt that the next fight about Dad and the strange mood that Dean had been in for weeks would come soon enough. For now, though, Sam seemed content to reconsider and regroup.

That thought worried Dean more than he cared to admit. Sam had been a terror since the age of five whenever there was something that he wanted to know.

The pills seemed to work, for Scott curled onto his side within fifteen minutes of taking them and fell into the deepest and most peaceful sleep that Dean had seen from him yet, so deep that Dean reached over twice and held his palm mere millimeters over Scott's nose and mouth in order to be sure that Scott had not died. Sam, thankfully, had fallen into a determined sleep of his own, as if he meant to show the entire universe around him that he could still take control of it if he wanted to. He neither saw the gesture nor the way that Dean leaned back onto his elbow and stared hard at Scott for a long time afterwards.

Scott, in addition to dropping off quickly, had also chosen as his sleeping place the farthest corner of the bed that he could claim without outright rolling off and onto the floor. That was just fine and dandy with Dean, as he was sleeping so far on the other side that he was all but using the bedside table as a pillow. Lots of space between them at the moment seemed like a great idea, and the more the better. Dean had strongly considered sleeping in the bathtub himself.

Dean did not think that he would be able to sleep at all, but, just as it had the night before, his body demanded its due rest and he drifted off. He had no idea how long he was out, only that the moon had set and the room was cast in ink and shadow by the time that he was jolted awake again. Dean lay on his back and stared for several seconds up at the ceiling, wondering what it was that had woken him before he heard the noises that Scott was making in his sleep. His thoughts were sluggish and thick like chilled molasses, and nothing like the whip-crack quick way in which he had been able to react a few hours before. This did not bode well for any attempts to take out a nest full of vampires, Dean would think once the sun was shining and he had several cups of coffee strong enough to stand a spoon up in circulating through his system. At the moment there was only a blind, instinctual reaction. He rolled over and reached out without thinking until his hand encountered a warm shoulder, which he shook. It was not until the owner of the shoulder made a protesting sound that Dean woke up fully, remembering Scott.

After Dean released his shoulder, Scott continued to shiver and mutter in his sleep, kicking his feet out at nothing and becoming tangled in the sheets as a result. Dean grunted when Scott got in a lucky kick to his thigh and reached for Scott again once it became clear that Scott was not going to pull out of the nightmare on his own. He encountered Scott's neck and felt clammy skin. Scott was sweating so hard that Dean did not see how Scott could possibly continue to battle whatever it was that was pursuing him without waking up. The pads of Dean's fingers began to tingle almost immediately. He inhaled sharply and then moved his hand back towards Scott's shoulder, resuming his shaking and ignoring Scott's faint grunt of pain as the stitches pulled.

"Come on, man," Dean whispered as Scott continued to fight his REM demons. He had an idea that they were far more literal than Scott cared to admit. "I'd rather you not fricassee us both here." When Scott kicked Dean again, Dean shook him harder and with a yelp on Scott's part finally managed to wake the kid up.

Scott lurched up against Dean's hand with a strangled cry as Dean swore and then wiggled over so that he could push Scott back down to the bed as Scott continued to shiver and shake. His hands were slicked with Scott's sweat; Scott was breathing so quickly that Dean was waiting for him to hyperventilate and asphyxiate himself. "Easy, easy," Dean murmured, and winced immediately afterwards as he realized how small and inadequate the words likely sounded to the panicky guy who was in the middle of being pinned to a bed. "Calm down." Scott was shaking so badly that it was a wonder that he did not shudder his own skin off of his bones.

Scott sank back down to the bed, his body going limp beneath Dean's hands, and said, "Easy for you to say." Even in the dark, Dean could sense him closing his eyes and could picture the way that his throat must be moving as he struggled to bring his pulse back under his control. Scott was still shaking so badly that eh was making the bed creak. Now that he was awake and presumably bringing himself under control again, Dean supposed that he could remove his hands, even guessed that he _ought_ to, but Scott's skin was so warm and pliant beneath Dean's hands, the thin layer of sweat-soaked fabric between functionally doing nothing at all.

Dean took a breath as he realized that he was in fact leaning over Scott, the darkness that shrouded the two of them that would have made it easier rather than harder for Dean to lean his head down and take Scott's mouth again. After two false starts, he knew damned well that it was not likely to stop there and had a feeling that Scott knew it, too. Dean listened to the sound of Scott's breathing beneath him, beginning to slow down by increments as he reoriented himself to wear he was. There were sparks leaping from Scott's skin and into Dean's own, bordering on the painful. With this in mind, Dean did not lean away even as he knew that this was probably the safe, sane avenue. He leaned closer instead. Dean was now feeling Scott's breath in addition to hearing it.

"You have to get this under control," Dean said in a voice that rumbled out as a command. What he was commanding Scott to do, Dean was not even sure, or if Scott would be able to carry it out if he understood. His own pulse continued to be one of the loudest sounds in his ears.

Scott made a soft sound that could be interpreted as a snort and tossed his head against the pillow. "What?" Scott asked. Dean had a feeling that Scott was still very much in the realm of his dream and not yet reacting to fully to the reality around him at all. Scott rolled his shoulders in an effort to pitch Dean off and sent a jolt of electricity flying up and into Dean, this one so strong that Dean had bite his tongue to keep from making a sound.

"That," Dean growled as he gave Scott's shoulder a squeeze that bordered on the cruel in response. Scott grunted. "Unless you were _trying_ to give me the light bulb treatment." And if he was, then Dean's whole mission had just been brought to a neat and total close for him. Somehow, Dean doubted that it was going to be that easy.

Scott made a shocked sound that then turned into a hollow laugh, and dropped his hand back down to the pillow. They were keeping their voices pitched low, as their faces were pressed so close to one another that anything other than a whisper was not needed. "When do the lessons start, professor?" he asked. "Since you're so sure that you can help me?"

As sarcastic as Scott's tone was, the warning jolts of electricity that had been traveling into Dean's hand had ceased. Dean was willing to bet that he could take Scott's pulse and find that it had fallen considerably. "What do you dream of?" Dean asked.

Scott sighed. It sounded defeated. "I see a man," he said. Had he not been so exhausted, Dean doubted that he would have gotten even that much of an admission. "He tells me to do things."

While that sounded a lot like the death row ramblings of every nutjob who had ever wound up in a clock tower with a stolen gun, their lives were not like those of normal people. "And he has yellow eyes," Dean finished for Scott.

Beneath him, Scott went rigid and still. "Yes."

"Done any of it yet?"

Dean sensed rather than saw Scott's glare. "No." He paused. "Not on purpose, anyway. There was a cat, but it was an accident. And I won't do any of it, either."

Scott's voice was stubborn and sure enough to make Dean willing to believe him for a few seconds based upon that alone. It was a far cry from the skittish kid that they had rescued a week before, and Dean thought for a moment that if they could just keep Scott pissed off all of the time they might have a chance. Given the way that things were shaping up between Scott and himself, that might not be a problem.

"What did he do to you?" Scott asked in a voice so low that, even as close as they were to one another, Dean had to strain in order to hear him.

"What?" Dean asked. He could feel his spine prickling.

"I know why I hate him," Scott said. "Do you have a reason, or are you just that charming?"

"We fight evil," Dean said flatly as he finally released Scott and rolled away, telling himself that it was only because Scott was no longer in danger of electrocuting them both and ignoring the inner voice which said that that danger had passed some minutes before. "That's all."

"Yeah, sure," Scott said in a snide tone. "That's a completely impersonal rage that you have going there, bro."

"Shut up," Dean snapped, and stared up at the ceiling until morning light started to come through the window.

---

Dean hardly waited for the sun to rise over the horizon before he rose, showered, and slipped out of the motel room without being noticed by either Sam or Scott. It was a rare night when Sam did not sleep like the dead, but seeing Scott being so still and so quiet gave Dean pause. Maybe he had run his batteries down during his tantrum of the night before. Or maybe the yellow-eyed demon was speaking to him about much sweeter subjects now than he had been previously.

It was too early in the morning for him to punch something, Dean decided, but that did not stop him from wanting to. There was a light fog shrouding the Impala and the motel itself as the sun rose and Dean drove away. He hoped that it would soon burn off. They had a great deal of hunting ahead of them, and all of it would be best done beneath a blazing sun. If it had turned out that Lenore had moved her nest into the middle of the Sahara, Dean did not think that he would have been displeased.

The coffee shop was being operated by a sleepy girl who may well have been a sister or a cousin to the sleepy girl who had checked them into the motel the night before, and her reaction upon seeing Dean was exactly the same. Dean was too distracted to even give her a smile back, and only checked himself into reality again in time to catch her crestfallen look. He slipped a dollar into her tip jar in apology before he left.

Sam and Scott were awake by the time that Dean got back, though neither one of them looked terribly happy about it. Just fucking off as soon as this mission was over and heading somewhere with a lot of sun, a lot of alcohol, and a lot of women was sounding like a better idea by the moment. They could come back with recharged batteries after a few weeks of rest had been accomplished first.

Metaphorically recharged batteries, Dean amended as he caught sight of Scott's sullen look and wondered for a moment whether this vacation was going to be for two or three, whether he ought to be wishing for a lot of friendly women who would be receptive to his own friendliness nearly so much as he ought to be wishing for a few quiet places in which to slip off with the opportunity that he already had.

Dad had told him that he was either going to have to save Sammy or kill him, no middle ground available. Dean knew right now, no soul-searching required, that there was no way that he was ever in a million years going to be able to kill Sam, not matter how dark Dad had been convinced that Sam could get. Even if that meant that the world was going to come crashing down around them both while his hand continued to shake on the trigger. Then Dean had better get to figuring out how to save him, even if he was still using Scott as the training wheels before he took up the big task ahead of him.

Dean also noticed that Sam and Scott were both wearing their shoes as he came back into the room. There were still too many shards of glass ground into the carpet to make it smart to go around barefoot. Yeah, and Dean was doing a hell of a job so far, wasn't he?

"Soup's on," Dean said shortly as he set down the tray of coffees on the bedside table and claimed his own. He had known without needing to ask that Scott would have about as much of an appetite as Dean himself did, and Sam never liked to eat before jobs. He was such a girl sometimes, Dean thought, not without fondness.

"That would be a problem," Sam said as he accepted his own coffee and nodded towards the window. He had pulled the curtains back, but the rays of sunlight that could make it through the fog were few and far between.

"It'll burn off," Dean said. There had already been the first signs of a sunny day being born even as Dean had been on his way back from the coffee shop. He glanced towards Scott, who was perched on the edge of the bed and watching both Dean and Sam as if he thought that he was going to be quizzed later. The shadows there were not helping Dean in his determination that, if he was going to save Sam, then he had damned well better figure out how he was going to save this kid. They had turned Scott's eyes into unreadable hollows. It was not making him any less hot, either, and Dean figured that he might as well give up now on ever having a normal sex drive again.

Sam was still indulging in that eerie ability of his to read the mood of a room that worked so well when he was on a job and was such a pain in the ass when he was turning it on his own family, and was looking rapidly back and forth between Dean and Scott. His eyebrows were crawling up again into that smug 'fix your mess' expression, and it was all that Dean could do not to make a face right back. He could know the smugness off of Sam's face this very minute by telling him what it was that Dad had whispered to him right before he had (stupidly, Dean stubbornly refused to stop insisting) gone to sacrifice himself. He could also utterly and completely destroy him. Dean swore that Sam would never know Dad's concerns until Dean's own back was against the wall with nowhere else to go.

He twisted his mouth into a smart-assed smile and said instead, "Might want to lose that look before your face sticks that way, Sam. Otherwise you really will have to date vicariously through me."

Sam rolled his eyes and did not lose the look. His loss. In their line of work, there really was a risk that they would run into someone who could turn that momentary expression into a permanent one. "Scott has an idea," he said in the tones that one would normally use to tell someone that their favorite pet had just chewed a hole through the phone cord. Scott first rolled his eyes and then fixed Sam with a glare, to which Sam appeared entirely unruffled.

"What's that?" Dean said carelessly, taking a drink of his coffee as he did so.

That was probably a mistake, as it was a manful struggle on Dean's part not to inhale the liquid and wind up simultaneously scalding and drowning himself with it when Scott said, "I want to go with you guys."

Dean pressed his lips together hard to keep himself from spraying both Sam and Scott with coffee, swallowed, and was thus also able to keep himself from asking Scott what in the fuck he was thinking in a tone that was sure to get Scott up in arms all over again. "No," he said, setting his coffee back down before he could hurt himself. "Not going to happen."

Scott's face darkened, but he did not appear surprised. Oh, good. Knowing that there was no way in hell that Dean was going to go along with that plan of his before he even said anything meant that he still had a working brain. Of course, the fact that he went ahead and asked anyway threw all of that into question again, so Dean guessed that they were at a draw.

"Why not?" Scott then asked, leaning forward and resting his hands on his knees. He looked as if he honestly needed Dean to tell him the answer, because he had no idea.

Scratch that, he was clearly an idiot. Damn. That was not a pleasant conclusion. Dean made a huffing noise before he pointed first to himself, then to Sam. "You're a civilian. Me and him, we've been trained to do this ever since we could first hold a weapon."

Scott only stared at him, face china-doll blank, for several seconds without offering up an answer. It was very different from the half-panicked man that he was when he first woke up from a bout with the demon whispering in his ear and from the smartass with the faintly evil sense of humor who had met Dean outside of the hospital. It was eerie, and it didn't do much to help Dean remember that he was supposed to be saving Scott before he had to put him down.

Finally, Scott stood from the bed and brushed past Dean, passing close enough to jostle their shoulders against one another. Dean grit his teeth and decided that, if he really wanted to have a lover's spat, he would vastly prefer a situation in which he was actually getting laid. He turned his head to follow Scott's progress with concern, but all that Scott did was walk over to the light switch and place his hand against the wall directly beside it.

"Oh, crap," Sam said quietly, sounding equal parts surprised and even amused. It took Dean a bit longer to catch up; he did not realize what Scott was up to until there was a shower of sparks that fell down to the carpet and a sharp smell of ozone. The room was plunged into darkness.

"Well, okay then," Dean said after a beat, while Sam beside him coughed and waved his hand in front of him as if that was going to chase away the smell of charred wiring. Someone in the next room over pounded on the door. It wouldn't be long before they brought the management running. "That changes everything."

"You fight evil," Scott said, something in his eyes turning hard and flashing in a way that they had never done before. 'And I'm not,' his eyes said. If only Dean could be as sure as Scott himself seemed to be.

Or maybe not, he amended, for Scott's hand as he took it away from the wall was shaking.

"You want to keep me out of this, you're going to have to tie me up and find somewhere to stick me," Scott finished, and Dean was so angry at the moment that he could not even appreciate the image.

"Get in the car," he told Scott instead, his voice very nearly a growl. Dean was pretty sure that he did growl when Scott turned around and walked from the motel room without another word. It was all that he could do not to destroy the remaining lamp himself.

"He's going to get himself killed," Sam said to him in a low voice as he grabbed their bags. Smart move on Sam's part, as Dean did not think that the management was going to be all that welcoming once they saw the damage that had been done to the room.

"Gotta love free will," Dean grunted. Sam's look caught him and held him stuck, letting him know loud and clear that another bout with terrier Sammy was soon to be coming. "Don't, Sam. Bigger things to deal with right now."

Sam's squinted eyes said that he did not believe that that was the case any longer, not in the slightest, but he followed Dean without saying another word.

End Part Five


	6. Chapter 6

Part Six

Dean had been right, and the fog entirely burned away with the exception of a few stubborn wisps in the low-lying areas by the time that that they reached the house in question. He cut the engine on the Impala a fair distance off, so far off that the car would not have been even visible through the trees, in deference to vampires' superior ears and then had spent several moments looking through the windshield without speaking. Even at this distance, it was easy to see why no real estate office would be eager to push the house as the property of the week. The windows, where they were even visible beneath the vengeful fingers of undergrowth that seemed determined to swallow the house whole, were boarded up with wood so gray and weathered that it was difficult to pull it out from the siding itself. Dean could see that a part of the roof had collapsed, and that there were animals running back and forth across the remaining surface. It was too far away to tell if they were birds or squirrels.

"Nice," Dean said finally as he wrapped up his assessment. "All of the comforts of home." He pushed away the voice within him which was saying that something was not right here, snarling inwardly when it came right back again. The last time that he and Sam had seen Lenore, she had been living with her people in a house that had not been tempting the law of gravity daily with its existence. It had been hooked up to electricity, had had books, even had a television that looked as if it saw regular use shoved into one corner. Without peeking into the refrigerator and seeing how empty it was, a casual visitor would never know that Lenore was anything other than Susie Q, new girl next door. She had to have been driven to some desperate straits in order to live like this.

Dean could feel the skin between his eyebrows drawing together as he considered the whole picture. Lenore with her every glance and gesture had seemed to reject desperation, as if one of the changes that had been made in her DNA upon her turning had been that she would never be capable of it again. Dean might not have been the greatest student when he was still in school, but he could do this math just fine.

Dean glanced over at Sam and saw to his dismay that Sam's brow was also puckered and that he was watching the house through the trees with an expression suggesting that he was also seeing bright neon signs screaming "Danger!" flashing all around it. When he and Sam fought over the wisdom of one particular plan or another, it usually meant that some middle ground could still be worked out where they could continue to save the day and hit things. When they had their Lassie moments at exactly the same time, then a bad moon was on the rise. This time was made even worse because they were going to have to wade into it, anyway.

"What do we do now?" Scott asked from the back seat, coming out of his interior world long enough to join them. Dean supposed that he ought to count that as a good sing that, while Scott had been off in his reverie, he had also given every sign of being the only person in his head.

"Oh, now he wants to follow directions," Dean muttered. Sam broke off from his worried staring long enough to snort out a laugh, putting his hand over his mouth and turning quickly towards the window in a futile effort to hide it. Dean was _so_ glad that Sam was still finding room for amusement in all of this. He glared as Sam turned back and grinned, for a moment erasing the tension and the suspicion of being so much closer than he actually knew to figuring out the secret. Actually, that part _did_ feel pretty good, no sarcasm in the equation at all.

"What happens now is that we try to sneak into that house without being caught and kill the vampires without being killed first," Dean said over his shoulder to Scott. "That all right with you?"

Scott displayed his teeth into an unpleasant and nearly inhuman smile. "I'll bow to the master." The badassed effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that, when he lifted his shoulders into a shrug, he could not control his wince as the stitches pulled. Dean rolled his eyes and exited the car quickly, Sam getting out of the passenger door at the same time and both of them leaving Scott to fend for himself. Dean cast the kid a glance as he opened the trunk to make sure that he was not actually going to drop dead right then and there, and then held up his hand when he caught Sam's stare.

"Don't, man. Don't even start."

Sam was still obviously boiling over with questions-Dean could all but see him struggling to push them back down as they rose in his throat-but he was also visibly making an effort to table them for now. Fight before the critical parts of a job, fight afterwards if you weren't so banged up that you didn't actually have any fight left in you, but don't you dare fight in the middle of it. As much as Sam liked to swear up and down that he was not his father's son, Dad's lessons still ran much deeper than Sam realized.

"Go to a bar, buy someone a drink," Sam said. "So much easier, I promise you."

Dean groaned and propped the trunk open. If Sam kept this up, then he swore that he swore that he was going to wind up blushing for the first time since he was twelve years old. "You're not planning on stopping any time soon, are you?"

Sam even smiled before he leveled his finger at Dean, the gesture somewhat colored by the fact that his other hand was testing the sharpness of a machete's blade. A bead of blood rose up on the pad of Sam's thumb, and he paused to suck it away before he went on. "Eight years. Think of this as eight years worth of retribution."

Eight _years_…Dean could vaguely remember busting Sam's chops over something pretty and with a fondness for shirt skirts, but he had honestly repeated the practice so often since then that it had all become a blur. "I'm shocked at you, Sam. That kind of grudge-holding is not good for the soul."

Sam examined his thumb again, apparently decided that the machete met with his satisfaction, and stepped back from the trunk. "No, but it sure is fun." He grinned. Dean could not help but seen an eerie parody of Scott's bared teeth smile in that, much as he wished that he did not. Shaken, Dean looked down into the trunk again and did not glance upwards until he heard his brother calling his name.

"Jesus, Dean, you look like you saw a ghost." Which was far more than just a clever figure of speech with them, but they were hunting something much more solid now. Too bad. Dean would have preferred a simple exorcism, much as he thought that he was really, _really_ going to get a kick out of putting his fist into someone.

"Fine," Dean said as he struggled to keep his jaw from clenching so hard that Sam would be able to see the muscles clenching within his jaw. "Mosquito bit me."

"It's fall," Sam said flatly. His eyes told Dean that, if he was going to lie, he ought to at least put in the effort of making it a good one.

Yeah, but Dean liked his way so much more. "It's a mysterious world, Sammy. There are some things that you just have to roll with." He nodded towards Scott as the kid finally joined them. Scott's face was pale and his lips were pressed into a thin line. Dean that moving around this much while he was separated from his painkillers and with his chest being held together with the contents of an airport sewing kit was a world of fun and giggles. He also knew that, after he had tried to warn Scott off and been both metaphorically and nearly literally snapped at, he was not feeling terribly inclined towards charity. "Has your spleen fallen out yet?"

Scott gave him a dark look before he split his lips into a broad, smartassed smile that made Dean feel much better than it had any right to. "Migrating towards the left," he said, "but I think that we're good for now. I'll let you know if the situation gets critical."

"Great. Don't think that I'm going to help you scoop your intestines up off the floor, though." Dean lifted a long-bladed hunting knife from the trunk and held it out to Scott hilt-first. "You ever used one of these before?" When Scott took the knife from him gingerly and gave it a look saying that he had never held a blade larger than a steak knife before in his life, Dean sighed. "I didn't think so. Okay, look. Take everything that you've ever learned about vampires from books or crappy horror movies that you only watched because you wanted to cop a feel off of your date and throw it out the window."

Beside him, Sam rolled his eyes and muttered, "Classy, Dean." Dean ignored him and went on.

"They are killed by beheading. That's it. They don't like sunlight, so that-" Dean broke off long enough to point at the merrily blazing sun that was waving down at them through the tree branches. The fog had long since been burned away. "Is still our friend, but they can endure it for short periods of time."

"And the leader of this pack is very smart," Sam added, doing his part to try and finally drill it into Scott's head that playing the hero when he had none of the training to back it up was a colossally stupid idea, right up there with the first person who had wondered what fire would do when it was applied to gasoline. Sam, for all of the conviction in his voice, continued to look troubled. Probably still thinking about how they had once thought that Lenore was not only smart, but was smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing and reform. Tigers couldn't change their stripes, big deal, Dean thought, feeling his mouth twist. It was only a matter of trying to figure out what those stripes happened to be in the first place.

"Still want to hop onboard?" Dean asked Scott. He kept all hint of a mocking tone out of his voice, not wanting to provoke Scott into doing something stupid out of pride. They had enough of that running high as it was.

Though he could not say where or how, there was a mistake in either Dean's tone or his words. Scott lifted his chin and straightened, coffee-dark eyes flashing for a moment before he answered, "Yes."

"There's going to be blood," Sam warned him.

"Fighting evil," Scott muttered in a voice so low that Dean was honestly not sure if it was meant for either Sam or himself, or that Scott even realized that he was speaking out loud at all. He shivered once before he looked up and said calmly, "I can deal with that."

"Well, that's because you're clearly a moron," Dean said in a friendly tone. Sam jerked and looked at him in surprise. Dean didn't know why, as he called Sam a moron all the time. "Has it always been like that, or is this a more recent thing?" Dean paused and let his brow furrow into a moment of mock confusion. "I don't remember Gordon kicking you in the head."

Scott's face had gone dark. There was a layer of panic hidden beneath the anger, shining bright as razor wire and every bit as dangerous, that made Dean feel badly for a moment. However, that only made him push that much harder. "Unless you know how to force me-" Scott began, as if that was really off of the table. Then, Scott did not know that Dean had, however briefly, entertained the thought of killing Scott if it should come to that.

"Thought never crossed my mind," Dean lied brightly, even though he had the opportunity to horrify Sam so thoroughly that all of his meddling into Dean's sex life would cease right there. "I figure that I'll just throw you at Lenore as a chew toy." He gave Scott a friendly clap on the shoulder before he selected a machete of his own and shut the trunk. Scott looked pissed; Sam looked as if he did not know whether to be amused or uncomfortable. No law that said he couldn't be both.

They took pains to keep their feet as silent as possible as they approached the house, as Dean and Sam could not say how good vampire hearing was and how far their range extended from their limited pool of experience. They were going to be relying heavily on the element of surprise, hoping that Lenore and her followers were asleep.

"Stay with me," Dean said in a low voice as they approached the porch, which was pitted with rotted wood and holes that looked as if they would be happy to swallow a foot. Beyond the house was a barn that look as if it was being kept up on luck alone, even more of its roof collapsed inward than was the case with the house. Dean hardly spared it a glance. The chances that Lenore would tolerate those conditions were even slimmer than the chances that she would tolerate the hovel in front of them. He and Sam would give it a once over when they were done with the house itself, but Dean was not expecting to find anything there.

Meanwhile, for all his bravado in the motel room and at the car, Scott did not seem terribly inclined to argue. His face was even paler than was his normal inclination, so that he was nearly the color of milk. He caught Dean's eye and nodded once in acquiescence before he shifted the knife into a grip that was more confident than it was expert. As Dean had not wanted Scott to come along at all, he was not about to tell him how much of their work came down to ballsy confidence in the end, anyway. "Okay," Scott said. If only he was so agreeable when he was not in danger of his life.

Dean glanced beyond Scott and towards Sam, who was looking at the house with interest, clearly assessing it for strengths and weaknesses of attack. "Try the back?"

Sam nodded and made sure that he had a good grip upon his machete. Unlike Scott's, his grip was borne of many, many hours of practice. "I'll meet you in the middle." He disappeared around the house so smoothly that the grass hardly made a crunching sound beneath his feet, even though every blade of it was long dead with winter. Dean hardly waited to see him go before he ticked his head for Scott to follow after him and crept up the porch. He placed each step carefully, expecting at any moment to either fall through the ancient wood or at the very least make a creaking sound that would bring all of the fanged monsters within awake and lunging right down their throats. There were parts of the wood that seemed even more well worn than those around them. When Dean put his feet down on these, he discovered that they made no sound at all. He glanced over his shoulder at Scott, intending to whisper a warning that Scott should follow in Dean's footsteps exactly, only to see that Scott was already doing so without needing to be told. He might make it out of this without getting his face ripped off, after all.

Dean put his hand upon the front door, tested the knob, and found that it was unlocked. Of course it was. Nothing that was within the house had all that much to fear from intruders.

Dean entered the house with the machete held at a ready strike angle, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the gloom. The only light in the house was that which came down through the fallen roof. Even before his eyes had reached a point where they could see in the shadow and make note of the dust that covered every surface, he could smell the mold and the neglect. A line of suspicion drew itself down between Dean's eyes. He could hear Scott's breathing and the quiet movements of his feet behind him, but Scott was staying well back of Dean and the blade. Smart kid.

Dean's eyes grew better, good enough for him to see that the only things that had been living in this house for a very long time were ghosts. There were chalked outlines marked out on the floor and, when Dean knelt down so that he could examine them further, deep red lines painted in something that was not paint. Dean felt his blood run cold.

"Get out," he said quickly to Scott as he straightened.

Scott looked equal parts frightened and confused. "Why?" he asked. Before Dean could give him an answer, namely that a shadow had just risen up behind him on the porch, that shadow stepped down on a loose board and made it creak. Scott whirled around and struck out with the palm of his hand, placing it flat against the shadow's chest. There was a short arc of blue light from one body to the other.

'Fuck,' Dean thought and may even have said out loud. He started to lunge forward before a heavy blow caught him on the back of his head and tumbled him forward into darkness.

End Part Six


	7. Chapter 7

Part Seven

As he slowly began to swim back upwards towards consciousness, Dean wished like hell that the pounding in his head was a hangover and already knew that he was not going to be so lucky. He grunted and struggled to open his eyes. The light was dim, but it still seared the backs of his retinas and made him turn his face away quickly, into what he realized a few seconds later was hard-packed dirt. The house, as ramshackle as it had been, had at the very least had wooden floors.

"Fuck," Dean whispered into the dirt, slowly and with great conviction. He felt the dust puff up around his face with the impact of his breath and could hear the shallow pantings of another person only a few feet away.

"Sam?" Dean asked, already knowing that if it was Sam he was either horribly injured or on the verge of outright panic. Sam was not a man who was prone to panic.

The panting ceased as the person struggled to get himself under control, and then Scott said, "No. I don't know what they did with him."

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Dean whispered the word aloud each time, raising his fist and bringing it back down against the dirt. He ought to have been pleased that he and Scott had not been bound. Right at the moment, however, he did not feel terribly inclined to thank the universe for anything that he had received quite yet.

Dean braced himself and rolled over, cracking his eyes open and stubbornly enduring the pain until his eyes were willing to accept that light was going to be a fact of their world again from here on out. The back of his head felt as if it had been given the loving attention of a baseball bat within the recent past. Thinking back, Dean realized that this might well have been the case. He could remember spinning towards Scott in order to shout his warning, a fuzzy collection of images involving a blue light, and then blackness.

Scott was only a few yards away when Dean found him. He was crouching with his shoulders hunched upwards as if he meant to touch his own ears with them and was had his hands dangling over his knees. His face was pale, and there was a bloodstain on the front of his shirt. Dean paused halfway through pushing himself back up to his feet as he saw the blood and the peculiar dazed look in Scott's eyes. "You okay?"

Scott jerked and nearly fell over, as if he had honestly forgotten that Dean was there in spite of having spoken to him less than a minute before. Dean paused and looked back, feeling a line drawing itself between his eyes all over again. It was going to become a permanent part of his face if he was not careful. Scott was not making eye contact with Dean, and it took him so long to answer that Dean was starting to wonder if Scott was forgetting that a question had been asked at all.

"I'm fine," Scott mumbled finally, eyes cast downwards to his hands as if he could not look away from them. Dean looked hard, but he could see no betraying mark or injury, only deeply ingrained dirt, as if Scott had been exploring their prison before Dean had woken up. There was a thin crust of blood at Scott's temple and the dark beginnings of a bruise.

Scott cleared his throat and finished, "I just pulled a few of the stitches. They stopped bleeding a while ago."

Either there was something a hell of a lot worse wrong with Scott than a few inches of thread pulled free, or the kid was made of much weaker stuff than Dean had originally thought. He did not think that it was Door Number Two, somehow. Dean paused so that he could give Scott a long, suspicious look before he turned away. Their walls were the same dirt as the floor, and above them was a roof or a trap door that had been constructed out of old, sagging wood that did not fit together well. Sunlight crept down through the gaps.

Dean tugged at one of the walls and watched as a fist-sized chunk of it crumbled away beneath his hand, landing at his feet with a soft thud. He stared at it for a long moment without speaking, feeling that old anger build until his throat burned with it and it was all that he could do not to clench his hands until the nails cut into his palms and began to bleed. Newly-carved walls, if the dirt as loose as that. Not for Scott or himself, either, not unless their captors had been hitting them across the head over and over again to keep them unconscious until the pit was ready. While Dean did not doubt that the spirit would have been willing, his head did not hurt nearly enough for that to be the case.

Didn't matter, Dean decided as he tore a chunk from the wall and hurled it back down to the ground before he turned away. He had known from the moment that he had entered the house and seen the markings on the floor that they were not dealing with vampires. Lenore probably was not even within one hundred miles of here.

"Do you know where Sam is?" Dean asked as he abandoned the wall. He would give climbing it a stab in a moment or two, but the way that the earth had crumbled beneath his hand did not suggest that he would have a great deal of success.

Scott shook his head without speaking and tensed to the point of flinching when Dean paced close to him again. The way that he was acting, someone watching would think that Dean was the reason that Scott had that dark ugly bruise at his hairline.

Dean swore an oath under his breath, hoping that Sam had through some miracle seen a sign that would have alerted him to the trap ahead of him. Scott flinched again, as if he thought that the obscenity was directed towards him. Dean did not see how. The kid was still staring down at his hands as if he expected to find the secrets of the universe etched into the backs of his knuckles.

"If you want to jump in on this brainstorming session, don't feel like you have to wait for permission," Dean told Scott. When Scott only raised his head and looked at him blankly, Dean sighed and turned back to the wall. As he had expected, the earth only crumbled beneath each handhold that he managed to catch, sending him tumbling back down to the floor before he got more than a few feet up.

"I already tried that," Scott said from behind him as Dean skidded back down to the dirt and barely caught his balance again before he would have fallen.

"Thanks for letting me know," Dean grunted as he dusted the dirt from his palms and glared upwards at their ceiling. When Scott stayed silent, Dean made a huffing sound and turned around. "You're getting a little children of the corn there, buddy. I welcome smartassed color commentary, in case you hadn't noticed."

Finally Scott's expression changed, a confused line appearing down between his eyes. "You don't remember?" he asked Dean in a soft and nearly hopeful voice, as if he would have been thrilled if Dean did not remember a thing. "You don't remember what I did?"

There were a few things that Scott could have said that would have caused more of a chill to run down Dean's spine, but only a few. "What are you talking about?" he demanded, even as wisps of memory began to come up through the throbbing waves that still radiated out from the back of his skull. Just before he had been struck and sent into unconsciousness, he remembered that Scott had thrust his arm out in a stiff-armed blow towards his attacker, and then there had been a flash of blue light.

Scott was watching Dean's face intently enough to see the exact moment when Dean got it. His mouth twisted into the most bitter smile that Dean had seen from him yet as he finally sank down into a sitting position, as if he did not have the energy to remain upright any longer. "Yeah," he said. "I killed him."

Dean exhaled slowly and told himself that he would stay calm, when all that he really wanted to do was freak the fuck out, get ragingly drunk, and then freak out again. "How?" he asked. If Scott could cross the line, if Scott could kill, then Sam, then Sam…it did not bear thinking about.

Scott ducked his head and sighed as if he could not look Dean in the face and talk about it at the same time. He looked more tired and more scared than he had ever since Dean had mete him and, even as his conscience twinged, Dean could not help but be thrilled at the prospect of finally getting a straight answer out of the kid. He was not disappointed.

"I can't always control it," Scott said after a moment of hesitation. "Not…not just in degree, I'm almost never in control of that, but sometimes I can't even control whether I turn it on or off." Dean thought of the pleasurable little jolts that Scott had a tendency to send through him every time that they touched and wondered if he had not come closer to being fried than even he had realized. "It's like flicking a light switch on a good day. On, off." Scott paused and stared down at his hands again. Dean had never seen anyone watch a body part with such loathing before. "On a bad day, it's like a lighting storm." Dean stayed silent in spite of the fact that Scott's tone was making his skin crawl so hard that it was on the verge of sliding right off and landing in a puddle around his face. He had never gotten Sam to talk about his own powers so frankly. "Sometimes even when I'm awake, I hear a voice that wants me to use the power to…" Scott's throat worked up and down and he nearly sighed before he finished, "Hurt people. Same voice that I hear all the time when I'm sleeping, the man with the yellow eyes."

With his speech finished, Scott only continued to stare down at his hands for a moment longer before he flicked his hair back from his eyes and looked at Dean again, his expression nearly defiant. Confession did not seem to be doing a lot of good things for his soul. Dean looked back at him with his eyes folded over his chest, the chill feeling of his spine not fading in the slightest. "Was the demon talking to you when you killed that guy?" he asked. Dean's voice scarcely rose above a whisper, as he was not quite sure what he was meant to feel in a situation such as this, which answer that he even ought to be rooting for.

"No." Scott went back to staring at his knees. Dean wondered if they were any more interesting than his hands. Scott had to have them memorized by now. "Just me. I wanted him dead, though. I saw him, I saw that he was going to hurt me, and I…I wanted him dead."

Dean sighed when Scott did not seem inclined to elaborate further and then fell silent, listening to the silence tick by and to the throbbing within his own head. "And you're going to, what, sit on your ass and whine about it until someone finally kills you?" he asked. "Remind me not to waste any more time saving it."

Scott whipped his head up, too fast. Dean saw him wince and then place his hand quickly against the wall at his back so that he would not topple over. "I killed somebody," he told Dean in a shocked whisper. "I killed somebody, and it wasn't an accident."

Dean stared at Scott for a long time, thinking a thousand different thoughts at once about the neat categories that did not exist any longer for Sam, for himself. Clearly, Scott had already been living outside of those boundaries for some time now. "These guys are murderers, Scott," he said at last, and surprised himself when there was no sarcasm in his voice. "They're human, not vampire like we thought, and they've killed at least one person already. So far as I'm concerned, taking one of them out of the world in self-defense is about as big a crime as stealing a pack of gum."

Scott cast his eyes down to his knees again after he took a quick inventory of Dean's expression. Dean sighed and nearly cursed again as he realized what trying to have an entire conversation like this was going to be like. He was lucky that the kid had not throwing himself into a fetal position and stayed there. "It doesn't work like that," Scott muttered. "If I could do it once…"

"You and Sam both, I'm lucky that the two of you don't spend your entire day self-flagellating," Dean snorted. "We'd never get anything done. Universe works in a lot of ways, Scott. Killing a murderer who was about to knock your brains out and then _still_ wanting to scrub yourself down with lye puts you about as far away from sacrificing virgins or going Darth Vader on everyone's asses as you can get."

"Yellow-eyed man says different." And all that had to be done to make Scott actually start talking was get him exhausted, woozy from blood loss and possible concussion, and soul-sick down into the very center of his being. Small wonder that the handful of psychiatrists that he had mentioned had not been able to actually get anywhere.

Dean sighed, pinched at the bridge of his nose, and for a few seconds wished that Sam was there for reasons other than the worry that was twisting at his gut. Sam was so much better at all of this crap. Dean just wanted to tell Sam to get drunk, get laid, and then get over it. Never mind that this treatment had not been doing Dean himself a whole hell of a lot of good over the past few months. "He's a lying son of a bitch," Dean said flatly. "He's a demon. He tells you that the sky is blue, you go out and check, and you bring three different witnesses with you just to make sure."

Scott lifted his head again. For the first time, he looked fully engaged in the conversation. Good, because wading through that semi-fugue state in order to get a response from an actual person had been starting to freak Dean out. "A demon," Scott said in a flat voice. There was a warning within it, but at the moment Dean was too distracted to hear.

Dean nodded. "For some reason he gets his kids out of poking at kids like you, with powers-"

"But it's a demon," Scott interrupted so that he could repeat. This time Dean could definitely hear the warning, but it did not make him change his course. "I'm not going crazy or turning into a homicidal maniac."

"I told you that from the beginning," Dean said.

"Yeah, but you didn't tell me that it was a _demon_!" Scott shouted, his voice sounding as if he wanted to do nothing more than jump out of his skin and, preferably, right down Dean's throat. Panic was a far cry from the anger or the hunkered-down determination to fight that he was going to need in the end, but it was a hell of a lot more than what Dean had been getting so far.

There was a creaking noise from above that caused Dean to throw a hate-filled glance upwards to their makeshift roof, but he did not motion for Scott to keep his voice down. It wasn't as if their captors did not know that they were down here. He and Scott might not, Dean had a sneaking suspicion, even be discussing something that they did not already know.

"That's supposed to make you better, not worse," Dean said as Scott seemed determined to work himself up and into a stroke right then and there.

"_How_?" There was a blood vessel directly above Scott's left eyebrow that looked as if it was on the verge of bursting like an overripe peach at any moment. Dean was even starting to worry about it a little bit.

"Means that it's this SOB who's got the problem." In more ways than one, once Dean caught up to him, Colt or not. "Not you. You're not the one who's twisted." Dean hoped like hell that he would never have to use this argument on Sam, but now seemed like as good a time to test it out as any.

Scott let out a hollow laugh. "And how do you figure that?" he snapped. _There_ was the anger, there was the fire that he was going to need.

"Unless you want to tell me that you wanted to get your inner Jack the Ripper on before this guy was talking to you." 'Please don't' tell me that you have these thoughts before the demon started talking to you,' Dean pleaded inwardly, not even realizing until that point how much he needed it to be true. "Then I'm failing to see a connection."

"No," Scott said, though he did not sound nearly so sure as most people would when they talked about their own ability to become a murderer. This was probably a good thing, for Dean would be suspicious if Scott was too sure of himself after he had taken a life for the first time. Even if that killing was justified. "No, I didn't."

"Then it's not you," Dean said flatly. "It's a demonic jackass with nothing better to do with his time than dick around with you heard because he can. A playground bully with a God complex."

Dean sounded so sure of himself that _he_ nearly believed it, and he could see within Scott's face that the kid powerfully wanted to believe it, also. Still, Scott said, "Have you ever had someone whispering in your ear twenty-four hours a day, until you can't even tell what's yours and what's his?"

Scott said it in such a matter of fact tone that Dean could not stop a chill from running up his spine. He fought hard to keep it out of his face, pushing himself away from the wall against which he had been leaning and pacing across the short distance that had kept him separated from Scott. Dean knelt down so that he was on an eye level with Scott, but before he did Scott was forced to tilt his head back so that he could continue to make eye contact with Dean. The long line of his throat was bared, pulse jumping beneath the skin, and Dean _really_ wished that his libido could figure out more appropriate times to exercise itself. Like, any other time in the span of human existence other than this.

"So fight," Dean said simply. Scott rolled his eyes, Dean pushed on. "No, I'm not going to give you a big speech or tell you to buck up, little soldier. It's as simple as that. Fight, or roll over and show your belly. Fate, destiny, that's all a load of crap. You decide what happens next."

"I've been going to see psychiatrists for months," Scott told him. What could have been bitter and sarcastic was instead strangely atonal, as if there was not a person in there any longer at all. Or if the person within those dark eyes was on the verge of simply throwing up his hands, laying down his arms, and declaring the war lost once and for all. "They told me the same thing in bigger words."

"Yeah," Dean said, and flashed Scott a bared-teeth grin. "But they can't promise you that they'll bring the fucker whispering in your ear right back down to earth again, and let you fire the bullet when they do." The second bullet, anyway; the second one was going to be all Dean's.

Scott stared at Dean for a long and wordless moment. Dean did not think that Scott was coming anywhere close to smiling back, not with a human corpse so fresh in his memory that he could probably still see it falling over and over again, but he was listening. Didn't need a degree to sort people out, Dean thought. Most of them already knew the truth, anyway, it was just a matter of making them _hear_ it.

Dean was considering trying to climb the wall again to see if maybe the laws of physics had changed over the past fifteen minutes since he had tried it last, when there came the sound of footsteps on the wood above. Dust filtered down through the gaps as someone in a heavy pair of boots paced back and forth before moving away again. From one second to the next, Dean's body became as taut as wire. He pulled his lips back from his teeth and was barely aware of the gesture, chopping his hand quickly in Scott's direction as he did so. Stay quiet, move back, he was not even sure what he was telling the kid to do. Scott took it as a directive to creep back against the wall and crane his head upwards so that he could watch the same person that Dean was viewing. A shadow passed across his face before that disturbing blankness that he could fall into at times overtook him. If Scott was using it as a mask in order to hide a deep, violent well of anger, then Dean thought that the two of them might actually be on the same page.

The owner of the feet finished his or her moment of indecision and stepped to the side again, so that the dust was no longer obscuring what little light they actually had. A moment later, the lid itself was thrown back, allowing Dean to for the first time see a series of fallen rafters. The barn, of course. Dean could have kicked himself for not going and giving the building a once-over before stepping into the house. Might have ended with Dean putting his fist into a great many more faces.

There was no reason why he could not make up for lost time as soon as he hit the surface, of course.

The lid fell back with an enormous clattering sound, a great puff of dust, and the startled chittering of songbirds. While Dean was busy glaring up, he was nearly struck in the head by the ancient and rusting metal ladder that was hurled down to them. When Dean had finished ducking away and swearing, a voice from above boomed, "Come on up."

End Part Seven


	8. Chapter 8

Part Eight

Dean's hands were trembling as he climbed the ladder, and it was not from fear. His feet were barely touching earth again before he was lunging towards a man in his early twenties, who looked as if he would be far more comfortable working in a video store than conducting dark rituals in the middle of nowhere. Dean hardly paid any attention to the gun at all.

"Where's my brother?" he demanded. His voice had a ragged tone that he could not control. Viewed in the right light, Dean guessed that it could be taken for a growl. His body language was certainly not fearful, as he was angling himself towards the man as he it was. It was all that he could do not to hurl himself at the man's throat right then and there, and he noticed the gun only barely in time.

"Close," the video clerk said. His voice broke, and he looked less like a big bad demon summoner and more like a college-aged idiot than ever. This was not disposing Dean towards pity; if the murderous moron had not bee proving that he had at least some experience with weapons and was staying far enough back so that Dean could not grab for the barrel, Dean thought that he would have broken the kid's arm.

'You're a goddamned liar,' Dean thought, and fought to keep the revelation from showing on his face. The only betraying tic that he could not control was a slight narrowing of his eyes. The rest of his body felt like one long steel coil, just waiting for the nudge that would send him over the edge altogether, and without any thought for consequences.

The faint scuffing of Scott coming up the ladder a few feet behind Dean was in the end the only thing that kept him rooted to his spot, made the roaring in his ears slow down again. Dean turned his head as far as he could without taking the video store reject from his line of sight. The first that he saw of Scott was the top of his head emerging from the pit that they had both been tossed into for safekeeping, those startling eyes. They had always been so dark; this was the first time that Dean had also seen them run through and through with a hunter's coldness. That could be good or that could be bad, but one of them had to step up and be the leader here. Damned if it was going to be the civilian who had bullied his way onto his first hunt long before he was actually ready for it.

Dean took a slow breath and then also took a step back, big fake smile that had been charming the ladies ever since he was fifteen. The video clerk blinked and looked troubled for a moment before he steadied his grip upon the gun again. Introducing heterosexual confusion wherever he went. From where Dean stood, that was a job well done.

Dean caught at Scott's elbow as soon as the kid was standing on solid ground, feeling the tension that ran all the way from Scott's arm and into his own. As if Dean didn't have enough already.

"Don't listen to him," Dean whispered into Scott's ear, ignoring the video clerk entirely for the moment. Let him twist his little head around and wonder who Dean was referring to all that he wanted; between Scott and Dean themselves, there was no doubt whatsoever.

"He's not talking to me right now," Scott murmured back. His eyes were so flat and so dark that it was hard to believe he was arriving at this conclusion without a demonic force pushing on him, yet his voice still suggested that this might be only the second time that Scott had told Dean the pure and unvarnished truth since they had met.

Dean exhaled. Oh, even fucking better. He was already dealing with the realization that Lenore had not done a single thing wrong, that in this case the tiger either really had managed to change her stripes or cover them with orange paint so thoroughly that she could still blend in with the tame cats for now, and that the real evil here was nothing more than homo sapiens with too much time on their hands. What that meant for Sam or for Scott, straddling with one foot over the line that marked them as human and one over the line that marked them as Other, or for Dean himself for that matter, was something that Dean could find the time to deal with. _After_ he had managed to keep the kid from going off like a nuclear bomb and getting the both of them killed because he was choosing the worst of all possible moments to follow Dean's advice down to the letter.

"Get a grip," Dean muttered to Scott, forgetting for the moment that he had been contemplating making the exact same feral leap for the clerk's throat. He twitched his hand around Scott's elbow for a moment in a grip hard enough to be painful before he remembered himself and forced his fingers to loosen again. A tingling burst of electricity across his palm was the reward. Dean whispered in a savage voice that carried and caused a terrible knowing to push across the video clerk's face, "And knock that shit off."

Scott looked first shocked and then ashamed; he had not intended to zap Dean and maybe had not even realized what he was doing until Dean had snapped at him. Dean waited until Scott had given a shaky nod to show that he had heard and understood before he released him and turned towards the real enemy here. The enemy that he probably should have been paying attention to from the beginning, not matter how much potential Scott had to be so much worse if given the right nudges. The enemy, for that matter, who knew more about Scott's ability than Dean could make himself comfortable with.

Dean flashed the smile again, and this time he showed his teeth. The hands that he was keeping clearly visible no longer seemed to be relaxing the idiot who had flashes of himself as some kind of great murderer. Dean would not be surprised if the video clerk decided to just shoot and bring it to a halt then and there, and thought that that fact that he didn't, coupled with his moment of recognition when Scott had pushed with his powers, didn't say very many favorable things about his real agenda here.

"So, why the cop?" Dean asked, deliberately lengthening his drawl until it nearly became a weapon in and of itself. It was all that he could do not to lace his hands behind his head and grin again, even knowing that there was a good chance that it would get him shot. "Was he getting close, or was there something about his face that just pissed you off?"

The video clerk's complexion reddened, and the gun wavered. Still too damned far away. If not for the conclusion that Dean had reached a moment before, he thought that he might have lunged across the distance, anyway, and counted on luck to save them all from the consequences.

"He made my life hell when we were in high school," the clerk finally said. Dean thought that he could hear the idiot's teeth grinding from here.

Scott coughed. Dean thought that he might even have been fighting the urge to hide a sudden grin in his hand. Now that _would_ have gotten the both of them shot. Dean was not getting the idea here that the video clerk was particularly adept at dealing with mockery.

Dean nodded and felt his lips twitch. Not the time, not the time, not the time. Any time that would end with a bullet in either his gut or his head was definitely a bad time to get his smartass on, no matter how much fun he might have doing it. "Great," he said. "Excellent reasoning. Carrie White could not have done better." Maybe a little smartass.

Dean doubted that the video clerk realized that it was a literary reference-Dean took a perverse joy in reading everything that Stephen King had ever written so that he could see how it measured up to real life-but he had almost certainly seen the movie. His eyes narrowed, and the color rose higher in his cheeks. Dean would not be surprised if the Littlest Sociopath shot the both of them right then and there. He was more surprised when the video clerk abruptly tilted his head to the side as if he was listening to someone before he grit his teeth and shook his head once, quickly. Dean waited for the guy's eyes to turn onyx-black and felt strangely cheated when they did not.

Sometimes, ordinary humans just sucked. Didn't mean that all of the non-humans did not suck just as hard. Scott seemed to have himself well under control now, but it was still something to remember.

"Come with me," the video clerk said, jerking with the gun so that Dean and Scott knew that they were to walk ahead of him. The gun had thus far been standing in for a great deal of the malice that the clerk could not muster on his own. In that moment, however, his voice deepened into a timbre that he had not yet shown before, rough and angry.

Dean kept his hands in plain sight as he was supposed to, ticking his head in Scott's direction slightly so that he would be followed. Scott seemed inclined to do as he was told at the moment. Guns had a way of making people nice and tractable like that, Dean had discovered. There was a still a hooded look to his eyes, like a weapon that was ready to go off as soon as someone twitched at the trigger. Dean was sure that his own eyes must look the same.

The bright sun that they had seen earlier had been shaded over with clouds again in the moments or hours since Dean had been knocked unconscious. Even with the new gray light that had taken over everything, he found himself blinking and squinting before his eyes were able to adjust. He had not realized how dark it had been in the barn until he was exposed to light again. As it was, Dean guessed that he could be forgiven for not noticing immediately that a second figure had come out to make sure that the clerk was all right, and that this person was also holding a weapon.

He also thought that he could be forgiven for the long stream of obscenities that he let out when he did happen to catch sight of her. The biggest sin was probably that he did not outright smack her in the mouth.

The same clerk that had checked all three of them into the motel less than a day before now managed to work up a good blush when she was exposed to all of the more inventive parts of Dean's vocabulary. The gun in her hand was big enough to look more like a toy than a real weapon. She beamed at him, bright and sunny, when she caught his glare.

"Come on, princess," Dean told her in a voice so sweet that it would have turned a candy-maker's tongue. The obvious fakeness of the tone only made the clerk grin wider. "After the fantasies that were playing out in your pretty head earlier, you don't get to act like my grandmother about a little cussing now."

The girl looked him up and down with a frank and unwavering interest that had once been flattering and now made Dean's skin crawl. "Duh," she said, her voice and her face combining to make it seem as if she had no right being out of high school. "But you don't have to be vulgar about it." She gestured with her gun towards the house. "This way, please."

"It doesn't have a root cellar you could have pitched us into?" Even in the presence of guns, Dean could not seem to keep his mouth shut. "That's just lazy."

The girl snapped around and glared at Dean, for the first time losing that sweet look. The angles of her face were cold and hard, and as he had with the video clerk, Dean would in that flash suddenly see the person who would have no problem whatsoever with taking another person's life. "It can't be desecrated," she informed Dean in a chill and nearly shocked voice, as if she had just caught Dean using holy water to mix himself a gin and tonic.

"And there are spiders," the video clerk behind them said helpfully.

"There _is_ that," Dean agreed. It was too bad that Sammy wasn't here. He had a feeling that one of Sam's reproachful glances would a halt to all of Dean's plans to kick someone's ass via a kamikaze run.

The porch creaked beneath Dean's weight as the four of them climbed the steps, but it held them for now. Dean could not stop himself from giving the railing a considering glance as he went up. If there was ever anything that Dean could have asked for a weapon, now was the time for one to show itself.

As if he was reading Dean's mind, Scott chose that moment to release a nervous cough into his hand. Dean glanced over and then took a double take, wondering how in the hell Scott could have gone from being a healthy guy with a few lingering bumps and bruises to looking like a tuberculosis case in the span of a hundred feet. Scott's face was waxen and pale, even more so than he had been when he and Dean had met, even as the blood that marked the front of his shirt was old and dark. There were deep smudges beneath the skin of his eyes. As Dean watched, a muscle in his jaw ticked.

'Jesus fuck,' Dean thought with a resigned kind of horror, like someone watching a mushroom cloud from hundreds of miles away. Scott was too far, and Dean did not have to time to reach him in any case, as he was shoved up the remaining steps so hard that he nearly stumbled. If Scott was going to go on a meltdown, then he was going to have to do it without the benefit of anyone else to haul him back from the brink. The shadows of the house enveloped them both with cold, reaching arms.

The only light within came from a series of candles that had been placed at intervals around the room. Dean's mind immediately recognized the pattern as ritualistic even as he could not stop his eyes from rolling. He and Sam had broken apart dozens of groups like this in their travels back and forth across the country, most of them made up of idiot kids who then had had to be rescued from the very things that they conjured. It took him a second more to realize that the smell of the candles was wrong, not like the Pier One discount bin selection. They were rendered from something else.

That was going to be a problem.

Dean took a breath and looked at the setup more closely, noting the way that the candles cast shadows that moved and danced across the chalk outlines on the floor. The blood was still there, and then some. Where before it had been old and of such a dark color that it had taken Dean a second to realize what it was, it now glistened and even seemed to dance in the rhythm of the flames.

"Nice," Dean said to no one in particular, to the two behind him who were still staying too far away for him to grab the weapons away from them, to the numbers who were beginning to file from parts of the house that Dean could not see, though he guessed that they were even filthier than the remains of the front room that he was standing in now. The candles were doing strange things to their eyes. "You're not at all ripping this off of a dozen bad movies." He jerked his thumb back once in the direction of the video clerk and felt rather than saw the man's expression of disgust. "He give you a discount?"

No one answered. Dean was, he was beginning to realize with a sick feeling in the center of his stomach, not the point here. Scott winced beside him and, clutching at his forehead, staggered hard as his knees unhinged on him without warning. Dean did not think before he reached out and quickly grabbed at Scott's elbow before the kid could fall. His fingers slid across sweat; Scott's breathing was becoming more pained and panicked with every moment that he remained in the house. As distressed as Scott was, the response was predictable. Dean yelped and drew back as a charge akin to shoving his finger into a light socket ran up to his elbow.

"Stow the batteries, kid," Dean muttered as he fought back the urge to suck at his burned fingers. The people were all watching, and none of them appeared to be particularly surprised by the pyrotechnics.

Dean had been speaking mostly to hear his own voice and had not expected that Scott would actually answer him. He was surprised then when Scott pulled his hand away from his forehead and shifted so that he could roll one black eye in Dean's direction. "We're past the point of lectures, I'm thinking," he answered in a rasping, pained whisper that sounded as if he was only a few steps away from either screaming or dropping to the floor.

"He's supposed to be here," the clerk piped up helpfully. "We were told that he would be here."

"Destiny. Great," Dean said. He eyed the guns and considered for the thousandth time lunging forward, actually twitching when Scott let out a low moan and then dropped to the floor. A hard shove in the center of his back nearly sent him sprawling as he struggled not to land in the center of the glyph marked out in the floor. God only knew what kind of ugly they were planning on drawing up.

Actually, Dean thought as he snarled and spun back towards the one who had shoved him, only to discover that there were a dozen or so people who were now filling out the edges of the room. Dean had a pretty good idea of what they were about to set up a collect call with, and on the slim chance that there really did turn out to be a God who gave a damn, then he had nothing to do with this.

"No," Scott muttered from his position on the floor. The dust was clinging to his sweat skin, making him appear ashen and barely human. His hands were threaded through his hair. "No, no, no, get out, get out." He looked on the verge of being undone.

"Scott, man, what do you think that I was talking to you for, the sound of my own voice?" Dean snapped at Scott. He was not sure that the kid could even hear him in his current state, only knew that he had to try. Rescue or kill, and he had given up on the second option a full day before. "I told you to fight."

Another shove towards the circle, another moment in which Dean snarled and twisted towards his attacker with a speed that had been instilled in him from a very young age. He did not hesitate in deference to the guns this time. The punk kid howled and fell back, the sound that his elbow made as it had been dislocated continuing to echo in Dean's ears. It had sounded like that of a jelly jar opening. Dean pulled his lips back from his teeth and would have followed up that sound by finding out what kind of noise kid's nose would have made as it shattered. Only the feel of half-rotted wood exploding upwards from his foot and then flying upwards to throw splinters into his calf stopped him. Dean did not even hear or process the roaring boom of the gunshot until a full second later. He been fired at. _At_ , not really upon, and that made all of the difference in the world. They needed, Dean realized as he cast his eye towards the perfect circle and watched the way that the runes appeared to dance and shimmy in the light of candles that might have been made from actual human fat, his blood for this. Otherwise the big Kahuna himself would not deign to rise up and give Scotty the stern talking-to that he so dearly needed for abandoning the mission. The fact that it would be Dean's blood that bridged the gap would likely only be a fun bonus, like discovering a toy in the bottom of a cereal box that was meant to be tame and adult.

Dean grunted and cursed as his arms were seized and he was roughly propelled forward, wrenching free long enough to get out a punch that all of the weight of his shoulder and about four months worth of pent-up fear riding behind it. He had not had the pleasure of hearing the first kid's nose break, but that was okay. He could make up for lost time.

'Damn. I guess there is something to all of that delayed gratification crap.'

Dean was barely drawing his arm back before he was seized again. He shook off his person, too, thinking that these people should be sorry that they were not vampires, as they would then have much more in the way of an excuse for being the monsters that they were. From the corner of his eye, Dean could see Scott where he was still on the floor. The hands that he had worked through his hair were white-knuckled.

It was about his blood, Dean thought as he was grabbed again, forced to his knees on the edges of the circle with too many people surrounding him for him to inflict the damage that he wanted to upon them all. Some of them, at least, also knew that there was more to fighting than holding a gun and looking appropriately menacing. He was the recipient of three punches to his kidneys that were hard enough and targeted enough to make his vision go momentarily white with pain and cause him to slump forward against his captors. He could not let them have the blood.

Dean heard one of them begin chanting in Latin, phrasing and intonation perfect enough to suggest that a great deal of time had gone into this plan, into this moment. The air felt pregnant and thick, the kind of summer day where every breeze was a fight. Dean jerked back hard at the first touch of the blade at his throat. Half of the reaction was understanding of the predicament that he was in, and half of it was pure startlement that something could be so cold while the rest of the room was so hot. He leaned away; the knife followed.

"Scott!" Dean bellowed. He could hear the kid behind him, breathing hard in what sounded, terribly, like an effort not to scream. "If you're ever going to fight it, do it now! Come on!"

"It's his destiny," the girl who had checked them into the motel said. She sounded equal parts puzzled and impatient, as if she had shown Dean a very simple math problem several times now and could not understand why he was so unable to put it together now.

"Shove your destiny," Dean grunted, and continued to struggle. Skill meant little when there were so goddamned _many_ . A pool of sweat was forming in the base of his spine. "Scott!" he yelled again, craning his neck in an attempt to see where Scott was. He could not help but feel a rush of doubt when Scott was dragged forward into his line of sight again. Scott still had his fingers tangled through his hair, knuckles clenched so tight that he must have been hurting himself, and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Dean could see his lips moving from where he was whispering to himself.

"Scott-" Dean began again, and was cut off by the motel clerk. She was wearing a smile so wide that it hardly made her seem human.

"You can't change what's meant to be," she told him.

Dean was about to give in to the urge to very wittily tell her to go fuck herself when he felt the cold press of the knife against his throat once more. Scott yelled.

It started as a yell and ended as a scream, a high sound of pain that made Dean's heart stop in his chest. It took him a full second to realize that Scott had even formed a word, as there was a heavy gush of blood running from Scott's nose and adding to the dried mess on his shirt.

"No!" Scott repeated, his voice coming back under his control by the second even as it sounded no less pained. He began to struggle with a speed and strength that Dean had not thought him capable of, finally working one of his hands free. Before Dean could react or even speak, Scott had placed his hand flat against the chest of one of his captors. There was that short arc of blue light that Dean already hated.

Dean could not breathe.

He did not have to, he discovered, in order to fight. Dean wrenched free enough to drive his elbow back hard into someone's abdomen, wishing like hell that the whoosh of expelled air had really been the cracking of ribs. When one of the people holding him fell back, it was easy to put down another, savagely. It was not until Dean straightened and felt a stinging at the base of his throat that he realized he had been nicked at all.

Dean could do a hell of a lot with his fists, most of which he would like to do over and over again at the moment, but he could not fight a bullet. "What did you do?" the motel clerk shrieked as Dean turned to face her. The gun in her hand was shaking so badly that she was lucky that she did not drop it, and any shot that she fired would be likely to go wild. No sooner had Dean had the thought than she took a deep breath and made a visible effort to pull herself together, turning the violent shaking into nothing more than a tremble. Well, fuck. "You ruined everything!"

"Yeah, that's kind of our gig." Dean cast a glance towards Scott, who was staring down at the body at his feet with devastated expression and looking as if he might be sick across his own shoes. No help from that quarter was likely to come. Meanwhile, the people who were not either unconscious or dead were looking more pissed off by the second. The pregnant, hushed feeling that the air had held was dissipating more with every second. In its absence, there was no way for the people left behind to hide from the sad things that they actually were.

'Well, fuck,' Dean thought again. His brow furrowed as he thought that he heard someone revving a car engine from far off in the distance. A second later, he realized that the sound was growing louder.

Dean had two thoughts as the front of the house exploded inward in a shower of glass and timber, sending the motel clerk pinwheeling in such a way that would have made Dean feel bad if only he were a saint. The first was a faint satisfaction as he realized that the wood of the porch was every bit as rotten as he had originally supposed. The second was to make a note to ask Sam when he had become so fond of driving Dean's car into houses. The dust had hardly begun to settle before Sam was popping out of the driver's side window with a gun in hand while the whole house leaned alarmingly towards him.

"Come on!" Sam bellowed at Dean and Scott both while he held the few cult members who were still standing at bay. Dean had other ideas. He knew that his expression was not pleasant as he stepped towards them. "Dean, no! I already called the cops. They'll be here any second."

Dean could hear sirens in the distance, confirming that Sam was telling the truth, but that still did not stop him from feeling that incredible urge to hurt someone. It was making black spots dance in front of his eyes and creating a roaring sound in his ears. 'Free will,' Dean reminded himself firmly. There was no reason why he should be any more immune to it than Sam and Scott.

Dean grabbed for Scott, who was listing to and fro as if he might pass out at any moment. After his second human kill in less than a day, Dean was not sure that he blamed him. He was also not sure that he wanted to touch him.

"Did I kill him?" Scott asked, keeping his face turned away and reminding Dean, infuriatingly, of a kid who was refusing to look at the extent of the scrapes across his own knee. Dean was on the verge of snapping at him to look at the damage that he had done himself rather than farming it out, when he happened to glance downwards and see that the man that Scott had shocked moments before was now slowly stirring back towards consciousness.

Now Dean was the one who was feeling as if he might pass out. "No," he said in a voice from far away. "You didn't." He grabbed for Scott's arm as Scott began to sway and put it quickly around his neck. "Ran your batteries down a little low, but that's it. Come on." They picked their way through the rubble and around to the back seat of the Impala. The sirens were very close and, while the few people who were still on their feet were beginning to panic, they were not going to get far.

Dean helped Scott into the backseat and then climbed in himself. "Just drive, Sam," he told his brother in a low voice as Sam twisted around to give him a curious look. He thought that Sam might push in that famous terrier way that he had, but with a shake of his head he threw the car into reverse and gunned it down the dirt road and out of sight mere seconds before the red and blue lights of the police arrived. Scott meanwhile leaned heavily against Dean so that they were pressed together from their thighs to their shoulders. Dean could feel a series of brief electrical charges rising from Scott's skin, so faint that they were barely there at all.

End Part Eight


	9. Chapter 9

Part Nine-Epilogue

Dean could count on one hand the number of times that he had allowed Sam to drive his car. At his rate, he thought that he was going to keep it that way.

"He doesn't see me throwing his computer at the bad guys," Dean muttered as he worked at pounding one of the many dents from his baby's hood, but there was no heat in the words. There was late morning sunlight shining down across his shoulders and onto the back of his head, working at the knot of tension that had been occupying his neck over the past few months. Even with his girl looking as if her blouse had been pulled open unexpectedly with her hood pulled off and suspended to the side like that, Dean was in one hell of a pretty good mood. Not that he was ever going to let his baby know that. In her current state, it might wind up hurting her feelings.

Dean heard the sound of footsteps behind him and took a quick glance over his shoulder, but did not tense up or go into any kind of defensive posture. Recuperating and repairing here at Bobby's for the next few days, they were not in any particular danger. "You're up early," he said over his shoulder. It was nearly noon. Scott had been sleeping from eight at night until mid-afternoon ever since the three of them had arrived, making up for lost time, and had slept without moving for hours at a stretch. The bruises beneath his eyes had faded into mere smudges. "Sweet dreams?" He adopted a teasing tone and quirked an eyebrow at Scott as he straightened.

Scott grinned and ran a hand over his hair. Dean remembered what he had thought upon first seeing Scott, that there was a potentially damned good-looking man hidden beneath all of that muck. That man was coming to the surface more and more often now, especially when Scott smiled, and Dean did not mind at all. "None at all," he said happily before he added, "The drugs help."

Scott had gone from waking up with screaming nightmares even when he was in the grip of heavy painkillers to dropping without moving for several hours after taking a light sedative. It would be better if he could sleep without pharmaceutical help at all, but that day was not there yet. 'Soon, though,' Dean promised himself on a regular basis now. Being at peace did not mean that he was ready for peace before the job was done.

"Glad to hear it, Snow White," Dean grunted as he set to work out another dent, his words nearly becoming lost in the sound. He reached out and smeared a long line of grease down Scott's white arm that was refusing to take a tan, smile when Scott glared. His ire only lasted a second before he was drawn towards the Impala.

"She looks naked," Scott said as he looked the car over. He sounded almost as concerned as he would if he had come across an actual girl wandering down the street with her blouse torn open. Dean thought that it might even be love.

"You know anything about cars?" Dean asked as he finished with one dent and straightened again to give his back a rest.

Scott shook his head and gave Dean a small smile. "I stopped being a mechanic when I stopped riding a bike," he said.

"Well," Dean drawled, taking a glance towards Bobby's house as he did so. It was difficult to catch a glimpse at all through the stacks of cars, and there was no movement that Dean could see. "I guess that I could give you some private lessons. You want to ride around in the girl, you ought to get to know her first." He reached out and took Scott's wrist, gave a negligent tug to bring him over and against Dean. Scott seemed to like this plan just fine.

"We gotta start now?" he asked, flashing Dean the grin that transformed his face. The skin beneath Dean's hand was humming with energy.

"Not right now," Dean allowed. "We can do something else right now." He put the hand that was not on Scott's wrist onto the back of Scott's neck and pulled Scott's head towards him. Scott was parting his lips before Dean even had the chance to touch him. Dean kissed him hard and deeply, pushing his knee between Scott's thighs and leaning him back against the Impala until the was the car rather than Scott's own legs that were holding his weight. His tongue exploring Scott's mouth was causing Scott to make a series of soft, pleased sounds from the back of his throat and to downright squirm against the hand that Dean was placing against his waist in order to keep him still. Dena could feel Scott's cock, half-hard and getting harder with every second, against his thigh and through the layers of denim that separated them. In addition to learning what Scott could be like when he was actually getting enough sleep, Dean had also learned that he could fill out a pair of jeans.

They fucked, lazy and slow, against the trunk of the Impala. Dean guessed that she could forgive him for the disrespect just this once. Scott sent pleasurable little jolts of electricity spiraling across Dean's skin. "Cut that out," Dean whispered, and felt rather than saw Scott's grin.

"I'm getting control of it," Scott whispered back. "I'm one step away from being a superhero." And then he cut himself off to release a groan from the back of his throat, soft and low. Dean gripped hard at Scott's hip when he came a few moments later, reached around to make sure that Scott came as well.

"You look like you're about to go to sleep again," Dean said, looking at Scott's face still flushed from the afterglow.

Scott lifted his head to give Dean a look that was both limpid-eyed and knowing. "Sucks to do it alone," he pointed out.

"That's true," Dean allowed. He gave his car a pat as he passed her, apology for making her wait. It might be a few more hours before he could get to those repairs.

End


End file.
